Reimagining Urban Life Is One of Our Best Bets Against Climate Change

The decisive battle against climate change won’t be fought in the Amazon rainforest or on the open seas. It will be won, or lost, in the concrete streets and buildings where most of humanity now lives. Cities are the engines of our modern world, but they are also ravenous beasts, pumping out the majority of greenhouse gases, devouring energy, and stretching global supply chains to their breaking point. They’re most of our species congregates and where we decide how our societies are run.

If we’re serious about building a sustainable future, the city is both our biggest liability and our greatest hope.

For decades, the narrative around cities and climate has been overwhelmingly grim. City dwellers are portrayed as passive victims of poor urban planning, firmly entrenched in concrete and fossil fuels. Cities themselves are shaped by backroom deals between developers and politicians focused on short-term economics rather than long-term livability. The results are sprawling, inefficient, and fundamentally unhealthy environments that heat up the globe.

We can do much better.

In his final book, The New City, the late microbiologist and sustainability visionary Dickson D. Despommier urges us to start thinking about cities in a different light. He argues that we already have the tools to build much greener cities. The New City strives to turn our gloom into fuel, pushing us to see cities not just as climate villains, but as our potential saviors.

The Urban Jungle

We don’t know what the world’s first true city was, though places like Jericho and Uruk have been inhabited for over 7,000 years. Cities, as a concept, have had their ups and downs, but ever since the Industrial Revolution, they’ve started to gather more and more population. As of around 2010, more people live in cities than outside of them, and this trend of urbanization is continuing throughout the world at an accelerated pace.

If you think about it, that’s a bit weird.

Although most people now live in cities, we barely get a say in how these cities are built. Decisions about zoning, construction, and infrastructure happen behind closed doors, brokered by developers and politicians. This is often based almost entirely on economic reasons, with everything else being secondary.

The results are what we so often see around us: cities built not for people, but rather for maximizing profit gains. We end up with overcrowded neighborhoods and many regions without enough schools or hospitals, because it makes economic sense for some people.

Despommier argues that this is where the transformation needs to begin. He argues we need to start having a say in how our cities are being designed and operated.

An Injection of Positivity Around Cities

A sustainable urban transformation isn’t a top-down process. Instead, it begins when citizens and innovators decide the current system is no longer acceptable. As he describes this catalyst for change, “Every once in a great while, things need to change. People tire of being taken advantage of. Some commit their lives to reforming city politics, and others work on technological solutions that benefit both humankind and wildlife. The latter efforts have led to:

1. the development of efficient and affordable renewable energy strategies;
2. carbon capturing, recyclable construction materials with low carbon footprints;
3. costs-effective atmospheric water-harvesting methods; and
4. productive vertical farms situated within the city.

I call these four applications of technology the four pillars of sustainability,” he writes in the book.

Despommier, a microbiologist turned sustainability thinker, is best known for popularizing the idea of vertical farming. But he has pushed various sustainable concepts that he argues can help us rethink the urban story. In The New City, a book filled with beautiful illustrations and striking concepts, he describes how practical, interlocking solutions can help us make cities truly sustainable.

Imagine cities powered entirely by the sun and wind, constructed from materials that actively pull carbon from the atmosphere. Picture buildings that harvest their own water from the air, and skyscrapers that grow the very food their inhabitants consume, slashing “food miles” down to “food feet.”

This isn’t just about bolting a few solar panels onto the same old structures; it’s a fundamental reimagining of what a city is for. For Despommier, the goal is clear: “Addressing this problem with human-centric urban design coupled with environmental stewardship is the only sensible way we can clear a path back to a more balanced, healthier life.”

Reimagining the Landscape

The example that struck me as the most surprising in the book is building from wood. Sure, people have built houses from timber for millennia, but skyscrapers and modern cities? That seems like a fairy tale in an age of steel and concrete.

Yet, this is where Despommier’s argument becomes so potent. The concrete and steel that form our city skylines are responsible for a colossal slice of global carbon emissions — some estimates put cement production alone at 8% of the world’s total. These materials are carbon-intensive to create and have no second life beyond being downcycled into aggregate. Wood, by contrast, is the only major building material that is grown. It is, in effect, a carbon-capture technology in itself. As a tree grows, it pulls CO₂ from the atmosphere. When that wood is harvested from a sustainably managed forest and used in a building, that carbon is locked away for the life of the structure.

The breakthrough that makes wooden high-rises not just possible, but practical, is a technology called mass timber, specifically Cross-Laminated Timber (CLT). CLT consists of layers of lumber glued together under immense pressure, with the grain of each layer running perpendicular to the one below it. This process creates massive, prefabricated panels that are exceptionally strong, stable, and surprisingly fire-resistant. These CLT panels can be used for walls, floors, and even elevator shafts, pieced together on-site like a high-tech LEGO set, allowing us to construct buildings of 20, 30, or even more stories that effectively serve as carbon sinks for decades.

This is not a “sometime in the future” innovation. CLT skyscrapers already exist and show remarkable durability and resilience. Similarly surprising technical innovations already exist when it comes to food production or water harvesting (which, in some instances, can be done from air).

Pragmatism and Optimism

But The New City is more than a technical blueprint; it’s a manifesto of pragmatic optimism. Despommier acknowledges the immense political and economic inertia that stands in the way, but he refuses to concede to despair. He reminds us that cities have always been sites of radical change, and that the will of the people can, eventually, reshape the world.

It’s a book that gives realistic hope at a time when hope seems to be a scarce commodity.

“Humanity has the resources, the spirit, and the intelligence to survive, even to thrive. But in order to secure long-term sustainability for our species the world at large must come to terms with today’s built environment, correcting its faults while celebrating its myriad positive attributes. Failure to do so will inevitable releate Homo sapiens sapiens to the fossil record,” Despommier concludes.