Within the complex, quickly changing social-ecological context of the Anthropocene, “What are the conditions for habitability?” has become a key political question. As the meaning and limits of habitation and habitability are being discussed, contested, and redefined across media and governmental narratives, one might even say that the twenty-first century—the “epoch of the human”—is developing as a multipolar battle over how and where life on Earth can and should be lived.

Over the last decade, resilience has been the dominant governmental narrative and practice, especially in the urban realm.7.3.1 Academic, governmental, and military strategists argue that it is in cities that the political and environmental upheavals of the twenty-first century will play out. In this vein, a 2016 counterinsurgency training video produced by the US Army and screened at the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations University warns of megacities, overpopulation, and dystopian new social-environmental threats.7.3.2 For governments and corporations, the “threat” is indeed clear. Climate change and social upheaval threaten profit, infrastructure, and governmental stability. Maintaining existing political and economic regimes amid social and environmental chaos is thus seen as priority number one. Faced with a future sure to be “crowded, urban, coastal, and connected,” as counterinsurgency theorist David Kilcullen puts it,7.3.3 governments and planners are using cities as laboratories to trial infrastructures able to preserve existing political, economic, and technological conditions. As the Rockefeller Foundation puts it: this is the “resilience age … there is no other way.”7.3.4 Worldwide, cities like New York and Miami, and even urban mayors themselves, are now described as “climate change first responders.”7.3.5 Alongside smart power grids and communications networks, cities are trialing novel forms of climate security infrastructures which are generating manifold new urban spaces particular to the Anthropocene. Here we might think of artificially engineered ecosystems designed as “living infrastructures”7.3.6 or organized neighborhood networks, now seen as the needed “social infrastructure” to supplement police and disaster response in times of crisis.7.3.7 Sought across manifold contexts, such resilience efforts are adaptive eco-cybernetic urban systems able to survive social-ecological shocks and stresses while maintaining their essential parameters. 

Urban resilience is one understanding of how the Anthropocene can and should be inhabited. Urban life, its proponents claim, can continue despite climate change; however it must do so within existing political and economic limits. Urban resilience narratives dominated proposed new approaches by media, government, and planners after Hurricane Sandy struck New York City in 2012.7.3.8 In this discourse, social, economic, and technological systems of Western, urban life are frequently portrayed as the best and only conditions in which human life is possible. Thus, many critics see resilience as an inherently conservative, status-quo, neoliberal- preserving paradigm. For political theorists Brad Evans and Julian Reid, resilience pushes beyond existing forms of neoliberalism to produce a degraded subject shaped by vulnerability, precarity, and insecurity.7.3.9 Still, resilience has proven resilient to critique, with planners and governments often incorporating critiques of resilience into recalibrated plans and approaches.7.3.10 

But now, a decade after Sandy, we may be witness to the emergence of a new, post-resilience narrative, focused not on securing existing spaces, modes, and conditions of inhabitation but instead on ending them. During the COVID-19 pandemic, as wildfires, floods, and hurricanes intensified and became more frequent in the US, discourse shifted away from resilience and toward suggestions that we may be at the “limits,”7.3.11 or even—as David Chandler put it—the “end,” of resilience.7.3.12 In the urban resilience realm, consider a recent Washington Post op-ed by Parag Khanna, a scenario strategy advisor named one of Esquire’s “75 Most Influential People of the 21st Century” who has worked for the World Economic Forum, Brookings Institution, and US Special Operations Forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.7.3.13 The piece was published in November 2021 after historic flooding in the Pacific Northwest, caused by an “atmospheric river,” poured multiple inches of rain in hours. According to Khanna, wealthy American cities like New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco can afford to build resilience to the rising seas, hurricanes, and wildfires. Others, however, cannot. New Orleans, he asserts, “is going the way of Venice.” Citing the growing number of hurricanes slamming the Louisiana Gulf Coast and the economic costs of rebuilding infrastructure like power lines that will only be knocked out the following year, Khanna argues that instead of wasting money on places that have, as Khanna put it, no “hope for recovery,” the US government must:

realistically assess which geographies are becoming unlivable and which are well suited to larger population settlement. It should then offer incentives for migration toward the latter and away from the former—and direct infrastructure spending accordingly. … Property developers should lure displaced Americans to gentrify the Rust Belt along the Great Lakes. The people of New Orleans should be given one-way tickets to Detroit, where they can contribute to the city’s nascent postindustrial revival.

In its elevator-pitch punchiness and solutionist tone, Khanna’s article is reminiscent of the many op-eds featured in the New York Times and other media outlets post-Sandy.7.3.14 However, his pieces imagines not salvaging urban systems—as does urban resilience—but defunding and disinvesting from them (along with attendant climate refuge gentrification elsewhere). Obvious questions arise. By what imposed means will these processes take place? What forms of life, relations to place, and communities will be lost forever? What futures will be foreclosed unnecessarily in the name of “necessary” adaptation? As geographer Kasia Paprocki shows, “anticipatory ruination”—“a discursive and material process of social and ecological destruction in anticipation of real or perceived threats”—is already occurring under the pretext of adaptation in regions framed as climate change hot spots.7.3.15 In places like rural coastal Bangladesh, which Paprocki shows is portrayed as subject to “inevitable” sea rise, governmental and donor agencies have preemptively salinized waterways to make way for more profitable commercial shrimp aquaculture. This “climate adaptation” project has unlocked new profit sources and dispossessed rural communities by destroying the infrastructural conditions on which they relied. Visions of an already obsolete city similarly swirl around Miami, frequently portrayed by journalists and scientists as climate change ground zero and doomed to be swallowed by rising seas. What political struggles would projects like those envisioned by Khanna inaugurate? What strategies would be appropriate to fighting “anticipatory ruination,” in Khulna, New Orleans, or anywhere else? And what becomes of “unsavable” cities? Who can and will live continue to there, using what means? 

In addition to punctuated disasters like Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans (Bulbancha)7.3.16 has long been shaped by “slower” catastrophes of capitalist industry. Petrochemical plants have transformed an eighty-five-mile stretch along the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Baton Rouge into Cancer Alley, where the air is filled with cancer-causing chloroprene, ethylene oxide, and formaldehyde.7.3.17 Along the Gulf of Mexico, subsidence caused by oil extraction is literally decimating coastal land, while salinization of brackish coastal ecosystems due to sea level rise is killing tree species: dead oak tree skeletons dot the sky, companions to the constellation of gas flares and smoke plumes rising up across Cancer Alley’s horizon.7.3.18 

What other definitions and conditions of habitability are there in the Anthropocene, beyond the shoring up of existing political, economic, and technological systems—which produce these catastrophic effects, differently but everywhere on Earth—or the imposed dismantling of existing spaces and ways of life? What will it take to fight for places and lands, for their continued habitability but also for the possibilities still beckoning within them?

As the Marcelle Beaulieu–founded Turtle Analytics group articulated after Hurricane Ida, the exhaustion that accompanies being made to live resilient life is widespread.7.3.19 Instead of human capacities of bravery, joyfulness, love, intelligence, and resourcefulness being used only to maintain current disastrous systems, these faculties can be directed elsewhere. Instead of accepting hegemonic views of the Anthropocene as an age of inevitable risk in which securing profits and living within limits prescribed by existing regimes is the only future possible, ordinary people can direct their heralded “adaptive powers” toward building others. What new urban spaces,7.3.20 processes, and strategies could this redirection produce? What rich realms of culture and anthropotechnical invention, human-environment interaction, and political solidarity could be woven? The habitability of New Orleans—or any other place on Earth—will only be determined by the people on the ground willing to fight for it.