A Fuller City: Rekindling the work of Buckminster Fuller in the age of planetary urban crisis

Crisis increasingly characterises urban life in the twenty-first century, as intersecting ecological, economic, geopolitical and social pressures converge on the city under conditions now described as permacrisis. This paper argues that the imaginaries of the twentieth-century designer Buckminster Fuller, when critically rather than celebratorily scrutinised, offer a productive resource for crisis-facing urban thought. Fuller is a frequent figure within design history but a marginal one within urban studies, and we bring the two fields into closer conversation to consider both the possibilities and the limits of his work. We do so through three of his designs, each read principally through one urban lens: the Geodesic Dome through architecture, the Tetrahedronal City for Tokyo Bay through infrastructure, and Skyrise for Harlem,through utopia. Read together we argue that urban studies is enriched by interrogating Fuller's designs, creating new opportunities to explore the contradictions inherent in his work and the politics they contain. We contend that Fuller's designs can enrich post-crisis urban imaginaries while cautioning against the seductive technological fixes they embody. Fuller, we conclude, is best read not as a blueprint for the post-crisis city but as a provocation to imagine it otherwise.