ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 of Planning Wild Cities is entitled ‘Through the security glass darkly’. This chapter explores what happens when urban planning fails. Urban society’s vulnerability depends on ‘critical nodes’ that comprise the critical infrastructure system in key areas such as energy, food, communications, and water. The interdependent nature of cities makes critical urban infrastructure more vulnerable to external impacts, where a disturbance rapidly affects different sectors. Despite this, humanity has yet to demonstrate we can make the scale of changes required at speed for humanity to continue to exist. Part of this entails repurposing our current systems towards radically reducing our carbon footprint. This also involves giving substance to notions such as equity and justice and ethical attempts to craft the way we collectively live to better shape the conditions of our cities within climate change. The chapter will be of particular interest to students and scholars of planning, urban studies, and sustainable development, and for all those invested in re-shaping our ‘wild’ city futures.
