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.