Booked on Planning

Miami in the Anthropocene

• Booked on Planning • Season 4 • Episode 10

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The ground beneath our cities is shifting—literally in coastal areas facing sea level rise, but also conceptually as we grapple with what urbanism means in an era of profound environmental, technological, and social transformation. 

Stephanie Wakefield's provocative exploration of Miami as a laboratory for climate adaptation challenges us to completely rethink how we imagine urban futures. Moving beyond simplistic narratives of doom or technological salvation, she maps the competing "imaginaries" that shape Miami's development: the relatively recent framing of the city as "sea level rise ground zero" versus newer visions of Miami as a crypto-capital or tech hub. These aren't just abstract ideas but powerful frameworks that directly influence what infrastructure gets built and how resources are allocated.

For anyone interested in the future of cities, climate adaptation, or how we might begin to imagine new forms of urban life in the Anthropocene, Wakefield's analysis offers a challenging and thought-provoking perspective.

Show Notes:

RDG Planning & Design
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Stephanie Rouse:

RDG Planning and Design is a nationally recognized multidisciplinary firm offering professional services in architecture, landscape architecture, interior design, lighting design, strategic planning, urban and comprehensive planning and design, graphic design, engineering and integrated and public art. Diverse in knowledge and experience, they are united in their pursuit to create meaning together with their clients and in their communities, and by their drive to live responsibly and do it well. Decades of dedication to success have taken them around the world and today their commitment to communication and technology allows them to engage clients anywhere, from their offices in Colorado, iowa, missouri, nebraska and Wisconsin. You're listening to the Booked on Planning podcast, a project of the Nebraska chapter of the American Planning Association.

Stephanie Rouse:

In each episode, we dive into how cities function by talking with authors on housing, transportation and everything in between. Join us as we get Booked on Planning. Welcome back, bookworms, to another episode of Booked on Planning. In this episode, we talk with author Stephanie Wakefield on her book Miami in the Anthropocene, rising Seas and Urban Resilience. We get into how Stephanie is using the term Anthropocene, as well as what an imaginary is, a new term that isn't used in urban planning today.

Jennifer Hiatt:

This was a really interesting conversation and, honestly, a book about a concept that I was unfamiliar with. Stephanie is really pushing the boundaries of how we think about and imagine the future of all cities, even though the book is focused primarily on Miami.

Stephanie Rouse:

One takeaway from our conversation was that her book isn't intended to have a definitive answer the future of all cities, even though the book is focused primarily on Miami. One takeaway from our conversation was that her book isn't intended to have a definitive answer or direction for action, but is meant to provoke thought on the concepts of how we are imagining the future of cities like Miami that are on the forefront of sea level rise. We end the conversation with the topic she wants to see researched further and expanded upon.

Jennifer Hiatt:

Yeah, I have to admit the fact that there was no finality. We were just supposed to imagine these things was a little different for me. So let's get into our conversation with author Stephanie Wakefield on her book Miami and the Anthropocene Rising Seas and Urban Resilience.

Stephanie Rouse:

Well, Stephanie, thank you for joining us on Booked On Planning to talk about your book Miami and the Anthropocene, Rising Seas and Urban Resilience. To start off, and make sure we're all on the same page with our listeners, what do you mean when you use the terms Anthropocene and imaginaries as it relates to your book?

Stephanie Wakefield:

Thank you so much for having me First of all. Yeah, just to start with the concept of the Anthropocene. So this is a term that became very widely used in many different fields, starting around, let's say, 2012, 2011, and really picked up in popularity over the years subsequent to that time. It comes from the Earth Sciences. It was coined by Paul Crutzen, a geologist, in 2000. It means technically the epoch of the human or the epoch of man, let's be more specific, and it's usually used in a few different ways. It's used to describe massive transformations of the earth by man-led processes like urbanization, different forms of land use, things like this, and there are kind of two different ways that it's used in the sciences that I have found kind of interesting. There's a geological use in geology and then sort of earth systems science usage. They're a little bit different, related, overlapping, but I think it's helpful to take them apart a little bit. In geology, the term Anthropocene is often taken up in order to kind of look backwards historically and to think about, like when this new epoch that we are in, you know, the earth's new epoch when it began, and to go back and locate that shifting point In Earth system sciences though, interestingly, it's more about the future of Earth and its systems and thinking about how industrial processes, urbanization, land use, so on have driven the Earth onto a new trajectory, sort of like this unknown new future trajectory that we're just kind of starting to see ramp up right now. I think those are both really interesting.

Stephanie Wakefield:

In my own work, though, the way that I use the Anthropocene was to think about the idea that we as a civilization have entered this sort of like new trajectory, this new epoch that both pertains to maybe, like the earth systems the way that I just described it an environmental question, but also a social question, like the transformation of culture, the transformation of politics and of society, especially over the last like 10 years, but I'd say like probably like several decades, where we're seeing this like real, like unmooring of the kind of like grounds that were, you know, previously in the 20th century, there, to sort of like give sense to thought and action, the way in which political boundaries don't really like operate the way that they did a few decades ago, to think about technological transformations and so on. So I've tried to use it in my work to think about this moment of like profound change and profound transformation, in which new thought is really required, and then to think about how, particularly in the urban realm planners, designers and urban thinkers how the Anthropocene is being imagined and how it's being sort of like developed in thought and practice, and then how those imaginaries are being used as sort of like the impetus or legitimating ground for all different kinds of interventions into urban space. And so by talking about imaginaries there, I'm kind of building on things about the imaginary, or imaginaries, not as sort of like, oh, this other realm of like the unreal you know it's like less real than the real but rather imaginaries is something very real that are created across all different forms, like discourse, media visualizations, images, map, planning, documents, things like this, that then circulate and get reinforced through repetition and maybe reshaped and remodulated through that circulation. And then these imaginaries that come to sort of like structure, how we think about and how we envision the future of cities and urban space. And of course, like throughout history, cities have been subject to and shaped by many different kinds of imaginaries.

Stephanie Wakefield:

The Anthropocene has given rise to very specific ones, and so what I've tried to do in the book is map those and like where they're coming from, how a city like Miami, which is the focus of the book came to be thought of as sea level rise ground zero and like climate change ground zero, because this imaginary of Miami is actually really new and didn't even exist, let's say, 15 years ago.

Stephanie Wakefield:

So how now is it so commonplace to hear people think of Miami in this way, to imagine Miami as the front lines of sea level rise and a place that's in need of resiliency interventions, and so what I do in the book is try to trace those imaginaries, specifically in media and academic discourse and visualizations, how those sort of fed back on one another and then get drawn into actual urban planning proposals and actual plans.

Stephanie Wakefield:

I think what's interesting is to understand this as an imaginary that serves particular ends and it leads, and is taken to lead, to very specific kinds of interventions in the urban form, like resiliency infrastructure. But it's also countered with other imaginaries, and so in the book I look at this idea of Miami as a sort of like new crypto capital in the new Silicon Valley, as a warring imaginary that kind of gets constructed and that maybe defeats the climate change imaginary of Miami. So it's a really interesting thing to look at how these different imaginaries get created, but also how they can fight each other and how they can displace each other, and things like that. Another question, then, is like well, what comes next? You know, miami is really this like place of the future and the sort of this frontier of imagination, because it's always been shaped by imagination, and so I think what's interesting is to explore, and maybe even contribute to what imaginaries still lie on the horizon for a place like Miami.

Jennifer Hiatt:

So one of the things that kept striking me as we were reading through the book and all of these different imaginaries that have been placed on Miami you know the rich person's playground type thing as it was first being presented with the flyer of the guy on the elephant right or the crypto capital or the ground zero for resiliency All of these types of imaginaries kind of seem to come top down to me anyway. So one of the questions you were kind of raising, or I felt you were raising in the book, is who gets to imagine what kinds of life can and will be lived in the human epoch or in Miami. And overall, like I said, it seems like it's a government agency or big marketing firms that are kind of answering that question for us and have in the past, but I don't think it necessarily has to be that way. So how could everyday people start helping to shape the imaginaries of the city that they live in, instead of taking this top-down force?

Stephanie Wakefield:

Yeah, I mean these are interesting questions, and so one of the things that I try to do in the book, a bit provocatively, is to really like rigorously question the quality of imaginaries you know that get forwarded from all scales and all different types of actors.

Stephanie Wakefield:

One of the things I try to do in the book is to suspend some of the assumptions that urban thinking tends to rely on, and one of those assumptions is a sort of like built-in idea that like good imaginaries come from the bottom up, right, and like bad imaginaries come from the top down, and it's like you have to find one that you know right and fight the other one. And so I try to suspend that assumption and even highlight it a little bit and step back and say like okay, where are the actually like dynamic imaginaries if there are any coming from? And one thing that I do is sort of look at some of these more grassroots imaginaries of resiliency, preparedness too, and say that they are also limited in their ability to think beyond what are already sort of like commonplace ideas of the human as a resilient infrastructure in some ways. And even actually, what I try to highlight there is that you actually see on the part of like really large scale governmental or corporate resiliency planning. You actually see like pretty transformative thinking going on, even if we can highlight like a lot of the limits of it. Maybe it's very technocratic. We can also see that it's geared towards this like pretty large transformation of how we think about cities and how how they're designed and adapting to like a what is imagined, at least, to be like a really radically transformed environment.

Stephanie Wakefield:

On the other hand, with some of the grassroots ones, what we actually see is what I try to show in the book is a loss of that transformative dimension and more this sort of like dwelling in the ruins, kind of like life should be it said in a lot of these imaginaries, sort of like survival infrastructure for dealing with disasters, you know, recovering from them and things like this.

Stephanie Wakefield:

And so what I think is kind of interesting there is to say, okay, if we jettison that assumption that's really baked into so much urban thought that bottom up is good, top down is bad, ok, if we get rid of that, then where do we find the interesting, compelling, dynamic, pathbreaking imaginaries?

Stephanie Wakefield:

In some ways I actually try to argue that the crypto capital of the world, miami, imaginary, is itself pretty interesting and quite novel in its own right pretty interesting and quite novel in its own right and that there's something to it that has a power actually to think about Miami as a place that is worth saving and propelling into the future. It's an imaginary that doesn't give into this climate change hysteria that is built into the sea level rise, ground zero imaginary right. So I try to kind of actually highlight that as what I think is a bit counterintuitive for a lot of maybe like critical urban thinkers, but to say that there's actually something really compelling there. The book's real big argument, overarching argument, is can we untether from these baked in ideologies and baked in assumptions that are in so much of urban thought and kind of like look at the things themselves as they are emerging?

Stephanie Rouse:

So in one chapter you talk about this concept of backloop urbanization, which was a new concept for me. What is this and how does it impact cities?

Stephanie Wakefield:

dominant in urban planning and design. The idea is that essentially all systems, including cities, according to resilience ecologists, go through sort of like two phases of life front loop and back loop. The front loop is sort of this movement from rapid growth and rapid transformation to a sort of stability phase, like a mature forest, let's say. And so in the 70s this was kind of like the dominant idea of systems and they kind of believed that ecosystems stayed in that state. But then one of the interventions of resilience in complex systems thinkers was to say well, actually systems also pass through a back loop as well, and a back loop in the sinking is the release space this time of all the energies and the elements that were previously sort of captured in the conservation stage getting set free. So a back loop is a time of extreme transformation, maybe collapse, maybe confusion, maybe destruction and renewal. And I found this concept to be pretty useful as a heuristic only in my own work for thinking about the time that we're living in, because we are living amidst so many rapid and cascading and difficult to comprehend transformations in the realm of thought, the categories that were previously used in the 20th century to understand and to stabilize being spatially in the realm of thought, the categories that were previously used in the 20th century to understand and to stabilize, being spatially in the realm of, let's say, creative destruction. Politically, you know, really in all domains we're seeing these rapid unmoorings and moments of chaos and confusion, and this is not coming from like a single disaster, like a forest fire, although that is the example that's often used by resilience ecologists to sort of illustrate the back loop. This is more of like an ongoing sort of civilizational transformation, and a back loop it's this like moment that we're in is maybe quite long, but to me what's really interesting is to think about okay, if you look at our moment through that lens, how does that change what you see as the possibilities for thought and for even design and planning? Or how does it change how you interpret what's already happening?

Stephanie Wakefield:

One of the things I suggest in the book is that a lot of these sort of like attempts to adapt cities through infrastructure in the name of resilience, some of these are what we might consider forms of backloop urbanization, a particular form of urbanization proper to this backloop moment, because they identify these rapid shifts in the baselines for urban planning and thought. They identify these shifts in terms of whether it's climate change, changing post lines and changing environmental conditions, or, in the realm of like, how we even conceptualize the city. More and more, it's thought of this complex adaptive system, equal cybernetic system maybe and even the role of planning is now being transformed to conform to that image of the city and to be much more about these sort of like emergent, even living, infrastructures, and so I describe this as the kind of backloop urbanization that emerges in response to a perception of extreme change, a time of extreme change, and that tries to build for a time of extreme change.

Jennifer Hiatt:

I work in urban development and land redevelopment and an observation you make is that the majority of resilience infrastructure that's being built especially in Miami but probably everywhere isn't necessarily actually to save people or certain human way of life, but actually to stabilize the real estate markets and credit ratings, which honestly kind of pierced my heart and like you're not wrong, but when you put it so bluntly it's like, oh gosh, that's kind of awful. How and I'm thinking more in Miami but how do we move past thinking about stabilizing real estate markets and whether or not we can get good credit ratings and actually begin to develop for people and community, when you're thinking about resiliency or just in general?

Stephanie Wakefield:

Yeah, this is a great question. I think this is a really interesting topic. So, again, like going back to imaginaries and how they get taken up, and they're actually a terrain of, let's say, even battle and you know strategy. So what I try to do is understand and map, like, really, what is the role of the sea level rise imaginary in Miami and how do different, like municipal actors respond to it? On what real grounds? Like, what really are resilience interventions? What do they mean? And again, I try to step back and take a non-ideological perspective on this and try to suspend some of the knee-jerk assumptions that I think a lot of critical urban thought would have about this and to say, okay, let's just see what it's doing rather than just saying from the get-go that it's bad, right, and just notice that it is and first understand it right. It is really interesting in and of itself as a fact that Moody's, like credit rating agencies, like Moody's, have decided that resilience building and mitigating climate change risk are key indicators of a good credit rating in the first place. I think it's just, it's felt very, very fascinating because it shows the extent to which the climate change sea level rise imaginary has been accepted and permeated even that sort of realm of finance and like international lending and municipal bonds and all that credit rating. So it's a powerful imaginary. Even if it came from journalists writing in Rolling Stone magazine and some scientists publishing some papers and the circulation between them, it's now more widespread, right. That fact alone to me is really interesting to note.

Stephanie Wakefield:

The geographer, samantha Cox, has written a lot about this, about finance and resilience in Miami. I have drawn on her work in the book to understand this and she kind of just shows that basically what's going on is that climate risk projections for a given city will be compared with resilience initiatives on the part of, like credit rating agencies, specifically infrastructure building. She shows that sort of like if there's an absence of resilience infrastructure initiatives, this is seen as making you more vulnerable, right to what the science is saying is the risk. So built in right there is already like a set of accepted assumptions about climate change risk rate and all that by the credit rating agencies and then essentially, if they see a mismatch between what the city does and the risk, the risks are said to be and how they're perceived locally and how governments are responding to them, so it's not just like scientific articles, but actually media stories around 2014, there was this outpouring of media pieces about goodbye Miami. Like Miami is doomed, millennials are all moving to Miami where they're going to drown soon. Like these are literal headlines that were all in a bunch of stories. There was just rapid fire publication of these stories in 2013, 2014. And around that same time then you start to see a huge investment in resilience building on the part of the city of Miami Beach, especially road elevations and like flood mitigation infrastructures, miami Beach rising above Eventually. Later on you see in some of the reports sent by Moody's to Miami Beach on there, the credit ratings they get like a very high grade, and part of the report specifies these resilience building activities as justification.

Stephanie Wakefield:

So there's this really interesting circular kind of like dynamic going on that I try to follow in the book between media pieces, academic discourse, literal municipal interventions into urban space, like elevating roads several feet and things like this, and then you know credit ratings, and so this is a really interesting logic where the imaginary is very powerful.

Stephanie Wakefield:

I think I'm not necessarily in the book trying to say that this is bad or good or just that it is, and I think one of the things that's interesting is to really be aware of this, of the imaginary and the imagination, as a terrain of strategy, really, and manipulation and creation, and then to think about well, what would it mean to you know, if you want to produce better imaginaries, if you want to produce other futures, how do you actually intervene on that terrain?

Stephanie Wakefield:

You know, it's kind of one of those like understand the battlefield kind of things in order to fight well on it. So I think that's like an interesting consideration. If the question is how do you move past this circular dynamic where you're just producing infrastructure to keep the economy going? Could there be a higher aim for infrastructure building? What would the highest aim be for a city and its people to think about in terms of what infrastructure is built, what infrastructure is removed? What are the higher aims beyond economic considerations? And I'm not sure it's even clear that those conversations are happening necessarily, at least in those terms, right, but it would be very interesting to have them and I think that's where urban design and planning should be focused.

Jennifer Hiatt:

Right, well, one of the things that just really struck me was that you mentioned a project, and I think that's ultimately not helping anyone overall, and so that was the storyline that got me thinking about that question.

Stephanie Wakefield:

Well, yeah, that brings up another interesting thing about Miami and these adaptation infrastructures, which is that they're talked about as like an experimental process on the basis of the idea that, well, a city has never dealt with rising seas before and tried to adapt to it in real time, and so they're like an experiment playing out in real time to see what works and what doesn't, and being sort of like refined and modulated as step by step through trial and error, which is interesting.

Stephanie Wakefield:

You know, this is talked about sort of like it's incremental adaptation in Miami, sort of like try it, see what happens. I mean, this is also the logic of adaptive management from ecology and like ecological management, the idea of adaptive management where you try something, see what works, you recalibrate, you keep going. You know, and I actually think this is itself a really good methodology for thought as well and for practice, because it is sort of a rejection of the model that you already have the answers, like a pre-existing set of answers or solutions, and then you just impose them on what is actually a dynamic and changing reality, whether those are conceptual tools or design, and so I actually I think this is a useful approach to think experimentally and to be willing to say, oh, it didn't work, and then to try something new, instead of just continuously doing the same thing over and over?

Stephanie Rouse:

So one of the more futuristic imaginaries that you cover in the book is this idea that relates to managed retreat and kind of demolishing areas of Miami to create these islands. Do you think these extreme new imaginaries have merit or are these ideas that are kind of one-off will move past them pretty quickly?

Stephanie Wakefield:

one of the more controversial ideas in the book, but I think it's the most interesting really. I mean there are many different similar kind of visions proposed or circulated around about Miami that you basically bulldoze the whole thing and like build new elevated islands, and this sort of idea. It's islandization imaginary. That's what I call it in the book. To me, I think, like you said before, I think there is a need to go beyond just like purely economic considerations when we're thinking about urban futures and urban design. Right, I mean, we are capable of producing incredible works of art when we build cities, when we design cities. Like the city can be a work of art. We always hear that quote from Jane Jacobs like the city is not a work of art. But I think that's false. It is and it can be and it should be, especially now we are looking at a lot of the urban development interventions of the 20th century and we're kind of able to try to take stock and see what was good and what was really bad. I love florida but like everybody involved in any kind of urban planning in florida knows that it's also a bit of an urban planning disaster in many areas, whether we're talking about suburbanization or kind of like sprawl or paving over paradise. A lot of I think big mistakes have been made when it comes to developing South Florida. There's something to be said for the idea.

Stephanie Wakefield:

There's something compelling, I think, in the idea of just ripping it out and trying something different, and that's kind of behind some of these visions. I mentioned this one in the book from Tom Gustafson. He was a former speaker of the House of Representatives in Florida, a lawyer, and has done a lot of work around like sustainable futures for South Florida, and I think he has some incredibly interesting ideas and one of them is this idea of the islands of South Florida which I've talked about a lot and it's in the book which is essentially, yeah, bulldozing the whole thing, using it as fill to build these different islandized settlements, linked by new bridges, self-driving cars, local forms of power generation and production, but interlinked like regionally with their own forms of defense on a library of Alexandria, this sort of like. There's a big, you know. It's kind of returned to this sort of like utopian vision, but with a creative destruction element built in. And I think it's really compelling because, even if you think it's totally unrealistic, even if you think it's laughable, even if you think it's evil or you assume that it's evil, you have to admit that it's like pretty audacious and hubristic and thinks beyond the dominant sort of like economistic or resiliency as survival kind of logics that do dominate the fields of planning and urban thought, and there's a lot of other versions of this island vision to a lesser degree.

Stephanie Wakefield:

Jeff Huber and Diana Mitsova and a team of other faculty and practitioners from FAU, which is where I work, did a really cool project that I also really like called Salty Urbanism and it was about kind of creating design and architecture proposals for a Florida that's like very flooded, a very amphibious, water-centric urbanism, and it also had like unplanning Miami to it, and this is then a later project.

Stephanie Wakefield:

That architect Jeff Huber also proposed Unplanning Miami, an unplanning division to complement planning divisions, to take out like outdated 20th century infrastructure and to adapt to an aquatic environment.

Stephanie Wakefield:

I think these are like incredibly like visionary, interesting, thought-provoking design proposals that go beyond the standard, just elevate things. And I don't think there's necessarily something wrong with the just elevate things kind of infrastructure intervention either, because on the other hand you could say the idea that you're going to elevate all the roads in all of Miami Beach and even if the extreme projections of sea level rise are real, come to fruition, let's say, because we don't know, we're not in it yet. Right, even if that came to fruition, it is a pretty hubristic, compelling idea to say, well, we can just elevate the city and continue to live around and with this water. I mean, that is also itself really interesting experimental process. Anyway, with these like islandizing visions of South Florida, I think what's interesting is the possibility of, like really radically transforming urban form and urban space itself in a region that really could be, I think, more interlinked with its environment and wilder and their visions of how you might do that.

Jennifer Hiatt:

Somewhat. To that end, you present a new concept the anthropocentric infrastructural nature. So can you explain what this is and how it could be transformative, in a way of thinking about nature as infrastructure, as opposed to putting in new islands too?

Stephanie Wakefield:

Well, actually, yeah, I mean so some of those island visions also have this idea of incorporating nature-based infrastructure like living infrastructure, and so this idea that ecosystems themselves living organisms oysters or the whole ecosystem of an oyster, reef or wetlands, things like this, the idea that these are themselves infrastructure and can be designed and harnessed for use by cities to provide services this is something I've analyzed a lot in my work over the last like 10 years in New York and in Miami. What I kind of have traced is the way in which nature has come to be defined in a new way as infrastructure and then like built and designed as according to that imaginary. So it's again a question of imaginary, where maybe this like modern stereotype of the idea that urban planners may have had, that like nature was this inert thing or like a waste or a dump or something like that outside the city. We're now in response to what are seen as like the perceived urgencies of the Anthropocene. We see this turn towards embracing nature and like bringing it in and imagining it as something like very dynamic and alive and like full of capacities. And I think that we have to think about this as I call it Anthropocenic infrastructural nature and imagining it as something like very dynamic and alive and like full of capacities. And I think that we have to think about this, as I call it anthropocenic, infrastructural nature, not because it's like environmental and not because it's just about climate change, but to get at this idea that the Anthropocene itself is taken as a call and I'm not saying I agree with this, but it's being seen and defined as a call reconnect the human and nature and like bring nature in, transform even the very basic fundamental categories of like Western metaphysics, like subject, object, city nature, things like human nature, things like this.

Stephanie Wakefield:

It's really taken as this impetus to redefine the basic categories of urban planning and then to do urban planning differently. So anthropocenic has that meaning here. Basically, this idea now that you see developed and then now being brought into fruition in New York, is that you can restore something like the oyster reefs that once were mile long around Manhattan. You can engineer them and restore them and then harness their capacity to act as like breakwaters to buffer the effects of like storm surge from a hurricane or something like that along the coast of a place like Staten Island. So this is an interesting project by Scape Landscape Architecture, kate Orff's firm, to build experimental sort of like two-mile oyster reef off of Staten Island, and this was one of those rebuild by design competition awardees from Hurricane Sandy back in, I think, 2013.

Stephanie Wakefield:

And it's now been completed, as far as I understand, the construction is fully done and this is a really like pathbreaking, really interesting project the thinking about city and nature, and infrastructure too because the idea is that, like through their life cycle, oysters build these reefs, they accumulate on top of each other and provide this living infrastructure that in some way maybe offers a better buffer to storm surge than a concrete seawall might, while at the same time providing like habitat for organisms and things like this. And in a similar way, we see the Everglades in South Florida being talked about as an infrastructure that could, if it's restored to its pre-modern hydraulic flows, could act as like a buffer on the saltwater intrusion into the drinking water supply in Miami's aquifer. So these are very different ecosystems oyster reefs and the Everglades, right but they're both being thought about as infrastructures that can be like redesigned and reengineered so that they serve these functions for, ultimately, the survival of the urban form that exists right now.

Stephanie Rouse:

It's an interesting new definition of nature and infrastructure the floating islands concept is disconnecting from global networks, and the weakness of our global interconnectedness has really been made apparent in recent years with COVID and many of the big hurricanes. Is this a future that we'd be seeing even beyond Miami? Do you think that other communities need to start maybe taking more?

Stephanie Wakefield:

seriously. I think it's definitely the zeitgeist, this like de-linking impetus. Of course, there's never delinking without relinking in new ways. Right, it's like creative destruction. You know, I mean, we can even think back to this sort of like older ideas of magic, like, you know, Giordano Bruno, or like older ideas of linking and binding reality as a process that actually involves delinking and then like selecting which elements you want to piece together.

Stephanie Wakefield:

I mean, this is not something you might normally hear talked about in the urban design realm, but I think it's actually pretty relevant here. You know, I think there's a pretty widespread sense that the globalization model has been a failure on many different scales and we can see that supply chain disruptions are only one manifestation of that and it seems like a big movement away from that global infrastructural and governmental network model is emergent in a lot of different ways. I mean, the Trump administration's tariffs are part of this. You know, the idea of relocalizing manufacturing is certainly part of this, but this also combines up with recent efforts to build new cities, to generate new cities, whether these are like the network states, Balaji's network states idea built on, like crypto and DAOs, or the idea of frontier cities. So there are all these new projects in that kind of vein. So there's, like California, forever, the line to Lhasa city, this practice. There's all these different efforts to generate these new cities that are kind of like operating on their own governmental logics, their own territories, their own infrastructural networks, and I think there's something very interesting going on. There's a lot of potential there to do interesting things.

Stephanie Wakefield:

A lot of this is couched in this frontier question. There was once this drive to build cities in the wild frontier and many cities were built that way, which is, of course, a very complex historical process, right. But today there's been this saturation of space and there's this sense at least this is what is described by a lot of proponents of these projects is the sense that to revive the sort of like spirit or like reignite American imagination this is what they say. Trump says that you need to have another sense of the frontier, of the openness and this like experimental freedom to innovate spatially. So a lot of these new cities are couched in that thinking, which I think is very interesting.

Stephanie Wakefield:

This has come up again with the proposal to sell a lot of federal lands in response to the sort of housing shortages. A lot of questions there, like well, did. Would the cities that you build look like? Are we building just more like sprawl and strip malls, or are we capable again of having like a massive process of experimentation in urban form? Could we take this moment, the need to even like respond to questions of housing and something like that? Could it be an opportunity?

Stephanie Wakefield:

And also, could we take the opportunity of needing to relocalize a lot of manufacturing and to innovate and to think about technological experimentation in the realm of, like, space exploration materials, things like this? Could we take all these new innovations and new needs and use that as an opportunity to kind of like generate new cities that really are experimenting in the forms and the processes of urbanization themselves? I think that's an interesting prospect. I don't know what it'll look like and I don't think that it's happening, and I'm not even sure that that's what's being said per se or proposed, but I think it is an interesting horizon to aim for and to think about what that might mean. I think what's going on in El Segundo is kind of interesting in this regard, because there's a lot of experimentation in hard tech manufacturing and thinking about can you really manufacture drones in America completely again, or what is the infrastructure needed for Mars colonization and what cities can support that kind of manufacturing. So it's kind of like a 21st century experimental urbanism which I think is playing out right now.

Jennifer Hiatt:

And switching from building new cities to killing old ones. I guess Herbicide has traditionally been a capitalistic restructuring of forestry development and I think most of our listeners will be most familiar with herbicide as used during wartime. But the book proposes a new way of thinking about herbicide. Can you explain what you were thinking there and how we could reframe it and take it from sort of a mass destruction to an opportunity for build?

Stephanie Wakefield:

This is another example of where I kind of in the book, try to suspend the assumptions that are built into a lot of like urban thinking and consider other possibilities for some of these concepts that circulate, you know. So here with herbicide, I'm looking at it in the context of some of those islandizing projects that we were talking about a second ago and drawing on some of this more conceptual work from the French philosopher Alexander Monin, and he has written quite a bit about the idea of design as depresencing or dismantling. You know we tend to think of design as like a creative activity, but he suggests that in the Anthropocene, in the 21st century, we inherit these are his terms, we inherit a world of pretty negative faces. Let's say, we inherit a lot of like terrible urban planning. We inherit a lot of terrible urban planning. We inherit a lot of infrastructure that is saturating the soil with poison, among other examples.

Stephanie Wakefield:

Right, perhaps moving forward and revitalizing space and even life has to also be a question of dismantling a lot of that, a lot of those forms, a lot of those infrastructures, even those spaces, cutting out the dead weight like a forest fire so that new life and new space can emerge. And so I try to think about herbicide in that context. Maybe there are some urban forms that need to be killed and destroyed so that new life can emerge. And I talk about this in the context of that islandization proposal, the islands of South Florida because a big part of it is actually like this delinking process, like you were saying before, delinking from globalization, from the global political order, but also the global infrastructural network, society, order, and so thinking about delinking as that process that's really essential to creating space for other forms of life to emerge. Herbicide is also something I try to conceptualize as cutting those ties. So it's not just demolishing like with a bulldozer, but it's also cutting the ties of 21st century, like planetary urbanization, which is this planetary network.

Stephanie Rouse:

And you talked a little bit earlier about bottom-up imaginaries tending to be a little more limited in their ideas and dwelling in the problems of the day. How can we reclaim urban imagination in the Anthropocene in order to identify possibilities for extreme climate adaptation that abandons the frameworks and the structures that we have today, that are really pretty limiting, that are really pretty limiting, I think it's like the question.

Stephanie Wakefield:

It's like we are totally in a crisis of imagination. It seems really obvious to a lot of people, I think in different domains. And how do you break through that? The number one reason, I think, that I ever tried to use this concept of the Anthropocene in my work was because it seemed like a way to situate ourselves and our thought and our practice in the now and to say we are in a new epoch, the situation has radically changed, we're not in the 20th century anymore and so therefore, our imaginaries, they should emerge from the now, they should emerge from these new conditions and they should respond to these new conditions. So really, what I'm advocating and have always advocated with the Anthropocene is this idea that we need an avant-garde for urban thought and practice, kind of like an experimental, future-oriented approach to urban thought and design.

Stephanie Wakefield:

And I think one of the great voices calling for something similar is Neil Brenner. I kind of refer to his work a lot in this book because he made this famous, maybe controversial, claim and argument for urban thought. He was like we are stuck in the 20th and maybe even the 19th century, using these outdated spatial concepts to describe a radically new urban condition. He said that, like urban thought needs to let go of these what he called inherited cognitive maps of the urban condition and enter into like an experimental process of thinking about what is actually emerging in the post-1970s restructuring of the urban global order, and to always be rigorously forcing ourselves to question those assumptions and those imaginaries that we're just sort of like dragging along by rote.

Stephanie Wakefield:

And so I think just even being attentive to that and always seeing ourselves in and understanding ourselves in this epochal new moment is really helpful. And beginning from the real, the real transformations happening around us, rather than visions of them, maybe from another century, can be very helpful, rather than like sort of deductive analyses, you know, based on like old concepts. Challenging ourselves to generate our own is, I think, the right methodological stance, but that doesn't mean I have the answer. But I think it's an attitude and an orientation that's not ideological and it's sort of like free and experimental. I think that's what's needed and from that I think that's where the fresh and the really vital ideas and practices will come.

Jennifer Hiatt:

And speaking of not having all the answers because we all never should like any good research-based book you lay out new concepts and leave readers with questions for further consideration. So what major concepts are you actually hoping that your book will help further and somebody will take up and run with and work into their own research?

Stephanie Wakefield:

What I call it in the book, the main like argument, main concept that I put out in the book is Anthropocene urban theory, practice I think that's what I put it or you might say, like 21st century urban thought and practice, and by that I mean what I was just describing this experimental pre-orientation to understanding and intervening by design in the present right. I think we're in a time of incredible transformations and we talk about, like, the housing crisis. There's a lot of talk about this in the news, but we might remember what Martin Heidegger said, like 70 years ago, that even talk about housing shortages in post-war Europe really obscured other questions, which are more even spiritual and philosophical, that we might want to consider, about the relationship between, like the human and space. I think we're in a time where we want to retake that question and really consider it on our own terms, in our own 21st century context.

Stephanie Wakefield:

We're living in a time of probably real profound environmental transformations, but we're also living in a time of great political upheaval, for sure, wherever you stand on that, as well as a time when, in the next few years, we're going to send human beings to Mars. We're thinking about urbanization of Mars and so, to kind of paraphrase, jg Ballard, the first city designed off Earth will be probably not that far off and it will probably be an American city. Who will be the not that far off? And it will probably be an American city who will be the Robert Moses or Le Corbusier of Mars. You know, I think these are the questions that we want to have in front of us, big, audacious, future-oriented questions, and I think we want to approach them with, like I said, experimental openness to see what can come.

Stephanie Rouse:

And as this is booked on planning, what books would you recommend our readers check out?

Stephanie Wakefield:

I've been reading a couple I really like Pierre Menon Metamorphoses of the City, thinking about the Greek project of the polis as the foundational element of Western civilization and what spirit and like what orientation to a higher human life was imbued in the polis and did the polis serve? And how might returning to that kind of thinking in our own context actually help us move beyond what we were describing as basically like economic, uniform urbanism. Think about what are the heights that urban design could aspire to now, spiritually and philosophically and even aesthetically. I also really love the Salty Urbanism book by Jeff Huber and, like I said, Diana Mitzover from FAU, I think the most interesting, coolest adaptation design proposal that I've seen for living with water, you know, because there's always this sense that South Florida could be a much wilder, more vibrant place. And maybe it was and that's been paved over and in some ways adaptation to sea level rise actually seems almost paradoxically to open the possibility of rewilding Florida and I think their book kind of barks the imagination in that way.

Stephanie Rouse:

I always love a good book on rewilding. Yeah, so many interesting concepts that come out of it. Well, stephanie, thank you so much for joining us on the show to talk about your book Miami and the Anthropocene, rising Seas and Urban Resilience Totally Thank you so much for having me.

Stephanie Wakefield:

It was great talking to you.

Jennifer Hiatt:

We hope you enjoyed this conversation with author Stephanie Wakefield on her book Miami and the Anthropocene Rising Seas and Urban Resilience. You can get your own copy through the publisher at the University of Minnesota Press or click the link in the show notes to take you directly to our affiliate page. Remember to subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts and please rate, review and share the show. Thank you for listening and we'll talk to you next time on Booked, on Planning you.

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Jennifer Hiatt

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Stephanie Rouse, AICP

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