Urban Futures, Climate Migration, and Platform Logistics of 21st-Century City Systems

Recognizing the mutual construction of the climate crisis by both science and society reframes an understanding of the mobilities of climate migration in an era of planetary urbanization. Drawing on the conceptual language of the late anthropologist Jane Guyer, logics of complexity foreground the importance of logistical relations between urban infrastructures and the dynamics of emergence in complex systems. Emergence is an affordance of urban fabric not reducible to a taxonomy of urban form. While new urban sciences powerfully evidence massive aggregated impacts of contemporary urban growth driving global warming, they are less able to conceptualize drivers of change on the ground that interface an agent (the city) and its environment. The article advocates a systemic urban lens to understand planetary futures of climate migration, making visible the power of both morphological logics and the fine grain of the ethnographic as dispositional redescriptions that make sense of past and future climate mobilities resulting from environmental change.