Focusing on writing about contemporary coastal cities, this open access book demonstrates how literature – in different genres, media, and cultural-geographical contexts – participates in shaping urban imaginaries in the face of climate crisis.

The current century has been heralded as the global urban century, a time in which more than half the population of the world is living in urban environments. At the same time, cities and their inhabitants, and coastal cities in particular, are at the forefront of global change, as sites that are particularly vulnerable to climate change and rising sea levels. Coastal cities face an existential crisis that is aligned with the crisis of all life on the planet, in which to imagine a possible future is to acknowledge the possibility of extinction, but also to imagine and work towards more desirable futures. Contemporary literature has long engaged in the framing of these challenges, and this book examines texts by writers such as Ben Lerner and Kim Stanley Robinson, Antti Tuomainen and Annika Luther, Renate Dorrestein and Ramsey Nasr that do just that. Adopting a comparative approach and focusing on cities like New York, Helsinki, Amsterdam and Antwerp, this book shows us a set of ways in which particular cities imagine their future – even their future destruction – but also a set of models, some fraught, others potentially empowering, to think of urban crisis and possible urban form in different contexts.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Tampere University.