It’s too late to prevent the apocalypse. Because it’s already here. A virus spreads globally, creating a pandemic, as yet uncontrolled. Climate change accelerates, and hurricanes, droughts, heat waves, and floods grow deadlier. Nuclear weapons and disruptive technologies proliferate, and economic dislocation and record mass migrations destabilize cities. Is it reasonable to expect urban centers, which are particularly threatened by many of these global phenomena, to do much more than mitigate the damage? And if world-altering disasters—from climate change to mass social breakdown—are inevitable, what can we do now to give our densest and most vulnerable communities a better chance of recovering from these apocalypses, and perhaps even thriving again in the centuries to follow?
University of Toronto professor and urbanist Richard Florida, Mayor Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr of Freetown, Sierra Leone, Forensic Architecture Senior Researcher Samaneh Moafi, and Serge Dedina, Mayor of Imperial Beach, CA and Executive Director of WILDCOAST, visit Zócalo to discuss how cities around the world might prepare for the post-apocalypse.
Zócalo and the University of Toronto present The World We Want, an event series exploring our current societal, political, and economic challenges and how we might emerge from the current moment.
Zócalo and the University of Toronto thank the Consulate General of Canada in Los Angeles for supporting The World We Want.
The Takeaway
To Reckon With the Post-Apocalypse, Cities Need to Better Invest in Community
Urban Areas Need the Buy-in of Locals if They Want to Address Major Problems From Public Health to Climate Change
Most people in the world today live in cities. So it is unsurprising that cities have weathered the extremes of an extreme historical moment: they are where the pandemic first …
Past Events in this Series
This Period of Crisis Can Help Lead Us ‘Closer to the Good’
From Studying Ancient Wisdom to Learning From Modern Emergencies, We Have the Tools to Be Better
The final Zócalo/University of Toronto The World We Want event, “Can We Still Find the Good in the World?,” delved into a wide-ranging discussion of what finding the good in …
The U.S.-China Rivalry Isn’t a New Cold War; It’s Bigger Than That
The Fact That the Two Countries Are Interdependent Makes Both War and Peaceful Cooperation More Possible
The rivalry between China and the United States is not a new Cold War, but it involves profound competition along economic, technological, and economic lines that create dilemmas for other …
Law Enforcement Isn’t Going Away—That Doesn’t Mean It Can’t Be Reimagined
‘De-Tasking’ Non-Crime Police Work Could Go a Long Way Toward Building a Safer Society
If our communities had fewer police officers doing fewer tasks, they could become less dangerous places for everyone, said panelists during at the debut event of a new Zócalo/University of …