Paper

Urban Imaginaries and Climate Change: A Way to Take Care of the City.

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Abstract

In The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh identifies climate change as “a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination”(Ghosh, 2016, 15). The difficulty of imagining climate change involves our profession, maybe more than others. As designers, planners, and landscapers, our role is to imagine solutions for the future. But how can we design a future for our cities without an unambiguous picture of the slow and steady disaster we live in?

The concept of city curation intertwines practice, technology, and policy, among other things. It considers the environment and communities broadly, encompassing both the anthropic and the natural (Kopitz et al., 2023). As professionals—but also as ‘only’ citizens—we have the deontological duty to take care of our cities. So, even if we cannot predict the future, each of us can be prepared to prevent, anticipate, and cope with what may occur.  

Viewing the future as an unwritten story, we actively contribute to shaping it each day. Through the use of urban imaginaries, we have the opportunity to explore uncharted possibilities and experiment with what lies ahead. Crafting narratives about future environments serves as a powerful tool to capture attention and evoke responses. Speculative fiction not only fuels creativity but also serves as a practical design tool for addressing climate change. Cities such as Amsterdam with its ‘Green Infrastructure Vision 2050’ and Singapore with its 2030 ‘City in Nature’ plan are embracing the use of imaginaries to drive positive change. 

With these assumptions, this paper aims to present how environmental narrative, through urban imaginaries, can be used as a design tool to convey more conscious city planning.

Keywords: urban imaginaries, city care, planning, climate change

How to Cite:

Labriola, V., (2025) “Urban Imaginaries and Climate Change: A Way to Take Care of the City.”, Fábos Conference on Landscape and Greenway Planning 8(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.7275/fabos.2434