Coastal Cities of the Future in Contemporary Literature: Literary and Urban Form in Times of Climate Uncertainty

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, Antti Tuo