NEWS
2100: A Dystopian Utopia
Fast forward to the year 2100. New York, along with Phoenix, Beijing, Sao Paulo, Manila, and many more of the world’s most populated cities, is irrevocably changed. Much of the earth’s great middle swath is subject to droughts, wildfires, and desertification, while increasingly frequent super storms plague coastal areas, destroying precious agricultural lands by bringing seawater far inland. Where in the world shall we live, and what will our built environments be like? The study envisions design solutions for a planet that will be more densely populated, subject to an array of environmental challenges, and significantly warmer, by an average of 4°C.
The future the book envisions is dystopian but the work is utopian, in that it sees the best in human potential rising to the occasion. 2100 serves not as a prediction, but rather as a warning and a call to action. It offers architecture’s response to climate change’s most challenging scenarios with design solutions that suggest the profound adaptability of the design field to meet environmental challenges in the future. Through 2100: A Dystopian Utopia, Vanessa Keith and StudioTEKA visualize possible design solutions to suggest the profound adaptability and possibilities of the design field to meet environmental challenges in the future. The issue is framed by noted sociologist, Saskia Sassen, with her preface and advocacy of “delegating back to the biosphere”.
Featured in Metropolis Magazine and Landscape Architecture Magazine and available as UR3 of Terreform’s Urban Research series: http://www.urpub.org/shop/2100-a-dystopian-utopia
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