Building Postcarbon Futures - by Billy Fleming (Paperback)

About the Book

This book offers the first comprehensive account of the myriad ways in which people are transforming their social, ecological, and economic systems to create more just, beautiful places in response to the climate crisis.

Book Synopsis

What would a postcarbon future look like? What would it take to build and maintain a more just, regenerative world? How would it feel to live--and to thrive--in that world?

Around the globe, people are transforming their social, ecological, and economic systems in response to the climate crisis. This book guides readers through 29 of these exemplary works, which span 43 nations and 6 continents. From Cuba to Kiribati, Iceland to the Andes, the prairies of North America to the expanding Gobi Desert, these case studies foreground the tactics and modes of practice being employed, often by marginalized peoples, to create more humane, hospitable places. With dispatches from more than a dozen leading scholars working on the front lines of the climate justice movement, Building Postcarbon Futures: Land, Justice, and Energy Transitions is both a celebration of action underway and a clarion call to the planners, designers, policymakers, and activists who are pushing this planet toward a future of collective flourishing.

Review Quotes

A horizon of hope and a tour de force that is a must read for every urban studies and social justice scholar and practitioner.--Ananya Roy, Luskin Chair in Inequality and Democracy, UCLA

A vigorous challenge to the stultified imagination of contemporary climate policy and design.--Nikil Saval, author of Cubed and Pennsylvania State Senator

An incredible contribution, offering creative models of land stewardship and climate justice that will push design practice in radical new directions.--Jenny Jones, principal of TERREMOTO and 2025 Smithsonian National Design Award Recipient

An urgent read that confronts the powerful forces that created the climate crisis with provocative prose, stunning imagery, and people and their land at its center.--Shalanda Baker, author of Revolutionary Power and former Director of the Office of Economic Impact and Diversity at the US Department of Energy

The vivid, provocative, and highly pragmatic collection of climate action exemplars that we've all been waiting for.--Jane Mah Hutton, author of Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements

This book puts the earth, the land, and the spaces we all share at the center of the climate crisis, precisely where they belong.--Julian Brave NoiseCat, author of We Survived the Night

About the Author

Billy Fleming is a leading voice on the role of design in responding to the climate crisis in our cities, communities, and landscapes. He is founding codirector of the Climate and Community Institute, a progressive think tank focused on climate and political economy, and assistant professor of landscape architecture at Temple University's Tyler School of Art and Architecture in Philadelphia. Fleming was the inaugural Wilks Family Director of the Ian L. McHarg Center at the University of Pennsylvania and an urban policy advisor to the Obama administration. He is coeditor of Design with Nature Now (2019) and A Blueprint for Coastal Adaptation: Uniting Design, Economics, and Policy (2021).

Contributors
Catherine de Almeida, Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Eliza Breder, Holly Jean Buck, Daniel Aldana Cohen, Keller Easterling, Kian Goh, Rob Holmes, Leah Kahler, Reinhold Martin, Danielle Rivera, Douglas Robb, Akira Drake Rodriguez, Matthew Seibert, Aaryaman "Sunny" Singhal, Abby Spinak, Charles Waldheim.