ABSTRACT
The Earth’s climate system, natural resource base, species ecology, and terrestrial and aquatic landscapes are now rapidly taking new forms. The rise of a human urban age is part of this wider, planetary-scale process of dissolution and reformation. Homo urbanise must endure a period of mourning and tribulation, and the spawn of dark fatalities before a blackened sun is brightened again by reborn human desire and possibility. The urban age is as much defined by a planet of slums as it is the gilded towers of global metropolises. Decades of neo-liberal globalism have engendered haphazard and poorly realised urbanisation, bequeathing a legacy of slum-bound cities that are exquisitely exposed to the smallest perturbations of climate, resource flows, or disease. Spratt reports growing expert and scientific sentiment for a ‘wartime mobilisation’ to realise the radical goal of climate safety.
