Imagining the Climate Transition: Design's Missing Middle

Architecture and design culture can vividly imagine the end of the world and the world after it has been saved, but almost nothing in between. That gap, argued in a recent ArchDaily essay titled "Between Burning Forests and Utopian Cities: Designing the Climate Transition," is the central imaginative problem of the climate era.

The essay's author identifies two well-rehearsed vocabularies. The first belongs to catastrophe: burning forests, submerged cities, abandoned infrastructure, resource scarcity, and mass displacement, refined across dystopian fiction, post-apocalyptic literature, disaster films, graphic novels, and video games. "We have become remarkably fluent in imagining the consequences of a world that fails to respond to climate change," the essay states.

The second vocabulary belongs to total technological transformation. Smart cities promise to optimize energy, mobility, and resources through ubiquitous computation. Artificial intelligence is positioned as a tool for managing systems beyond human coordination. Geoengineering engages the atmosphere, while floating settlements, underwater habitats, and extraterrestrial colonies extend habitation into new environments. These narratives, the author notes, typically take place after conflict has been resolved and a new equilibrium established.

The climate transition itself occupies neither territory. The essay frames three escapes from imagining it: climate denial rejects the necessity of transition; climate doom treats transformation as impossible; and technological salvation — "one particularly seductive to design" — imagines that a sufficiently powerful innovation lets society leap from crisis to resolution. The transition will instead run through what the author calls an "underappreciated, undervalued middle": decades of repair, adaptation, and restoration.

Why the middle resists storytelling

Transformation is easier to imagine when there is a decisive moment — a breakthrough technology, a new piece of infrastructure — that creates a clean before and after. The climate transition will have neither. Buildings will be retrofitted while others are demolished. Energy systems will change at different speeds. Landscapes will be restored while continuing to support production. New technologies will operate alongside older infrastructures. Adaptation, maintenance, and resilience unfold gradually and unevenly.

This distribution of agency makes the transition a difficult story. Its actors are governments, communities, designers, engineers, utilities, industries, trades, and generations — no single invention or protagonist. Its achievements will be embedded in ordinary, slow decisions. The essay's central question follows: "Will adaptation, maintenance, repair, and resilience become the material of compelling futures?"

The lure of the clean slate

Technology will be indispensable to any viable transition — renewable energy, electrification, new materials, carbon removal, computation. The fantasy, the author argues, is believing innovation can resolve environmental constraints while leaving contemporary life's systems and expectations intact.

The smart city exemplifies the problem. Sensors, data, automation, and interconnected infrastructure have meaningful applications in energy, transportation, water, and resource management. But the smart city's influential image of sustainability frames environmental problems as manageable through information and optimization, leaving "more difficult questions about consumption, mobility, land use, construction, and existing urban fabric outside the frame." Efficiency changes how a city operates, not what it consumes, preserves, replaces, or relinquishes.

The Line at NEOM pushes the proposition further by starting from an entirely new urban condition: a city organized around density, renewable energy, automated mobility, and extensive technological infrastructure, free from the spatial patterns of existing cities. "As an image of a climate future, the clean slate is enticing," the essay notes — it permits radical urban change without inherited remnants or competing interests. Similar narratives appear at every scale, from autonomous environments and vast carbon removal systems to geoengineering and extraterrestrial habitation.

The ordinary work

Much of the transition will happen within the built world that already exists. Buildings need adaptation, repair, reuse, and maintenance; neighborhoods will respond to changing conditions. Significance accumulates through thousands of projects altering resource use, material lifespans, and climate response — progress as a compounding series, not a single image.

At larger scales, cities, regions, states, and countries must coordinate changes across energy, transportation, materials, water, land, regulation, finance, and governance, on different timelines and across political boundaries. The essay asks how designers can visualize "a future defined by relationships, dependencies, sequences, and decades of coordinated change."

Designers already possess the tools — drawings, models, simulations, scenarios, films, games, and increasingly AI. Transition demands they engage time, sequence, uncertainty, and adaptation: how places change over five, twenty, or fifty years, what remains, what becomes obsolete, and how interventions accumulate. Lifecycle thinking, material inventories, post-occupancy research, ecological knowledge, maintenance practices, historical precedent, scenario planning, and systems thinking can ground that work in present conditions.

Writers, filmmakers, game designers, artists, and journalists determine which futures become familiar enough to debate or desire. The essay closes with its challenge: if climate denial removes the necessity for action and climate doom narrows its possibility, climate optimism should rest on the capacity to act within the inherited world. "If we can imagine the end of the world, and the world after it has been saved, can we become equally ambitious in imagining the work required in between?"

The piece forms part of ArchDaily's monthly topic, The Lure of Escapism in Architecture and Alternative Worlds.