In 2018, dozens of people died in Tokyo as temperatures exceeded 40°C for several continuous days, and in California the town of Paradise was largely destroyed by a wild fire in just a few hours killing 85 people. In the summer of 2021, deadly flash floods killed scores of people in the Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler area of Germany. In early 2022 Cyclone Batsirai left 120 people dead and nine out of ten homes destroyed in Madagascar's coastal city Mananjary, while later that year residents of Jacobabad in Pakistan endured temperatures almost intolerable to humans at 51°C.

As these climate disasters unfold, our urban world continues to grow. One recent estimate suggests that 290,000 km2 of natural habitat could be converted to urban land between 2000 and 2030, with huge implications for habitat and biodiversity loss (McDonald et al. 2020). In the UK, between 2006 and 2012, 22,000 hectares of green space has already been lost to urban sprawl, the equivalent of an entire city, while in Shanghai urban greenspace declined by 30 per cent between 1980 and 2015 (Wu et al. 2019).

Equally worrying are the persistent social challenges facing our urban world. In Africa only 15 per cent of residents in Lagos and Kampala have piped water to their dwelling (Beard & Mitlin 2021), while in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Chad only around 40 per cent of the urban population have access to electricity (Our World in Data 2020). A recent study found that 51,000 premature deaths could be prevented each year across 1,000 European cities if they achieved levels of small particulate air pollution (PM2.5) recommended by the World Health Organisation (Knomenko et al. 2021). In New York, according to the Eviction Lab (2022), there were almost 180,000 evictions filed by landlords between 2020 and 2022.

Getting into emergency mode …

These examples are not isolated or trivial. What we make of them is the core argument of this book. They are a selection of events and facts that represent the broader climate, ecological and social emergencies currently experienced in our urban world.