If sprawling desert metropolises like Phoenix, Arizona, are going to survive an increasingly scorching climate, they will require a different kind of sustainable urbanism than typical cities, says Aaron Betsky.

Is Phoenix doomed to fall back into the ashes" In his 2015 book, The Water Knife, the author Paolo Bacigalupi imagines a future Valley of the Sun that has shrunk back to its urban core: "a dust-draped sprawl of low-rises and abandoned singe-families slumping across the flat desert basin. Mesa, Tempe, Chandler, Gilbert, Scottsdale ? the remains of a metropolitan sea that had flooded the open basin, filling it with houses and arrow-straight boulevards until they lapped against the saguaro-studded mountains at its rim." It is a scene of total collapse: "In her own mind she imagined Phoenix as a sinkhole, sucking everything down ? buildings, lives, streets, history ? all of it tipping and spilling into the gaping maw of disaster ?sand, slumped saguaros, subdivisions, all of it going down."
What remains of the city is the kind of war zone we know from science-fiction movies and the alt-right's imagination of urban areas today. Downtown, the rich living in high-rises, cocooned with filtered air, abundant water, and cool temperatures.
Ironically, these structures are "arcologies", "a half-alive monster looming over all things Phoenix", filled with "braided waterfalls and hanging gardens", and patterned on architect Pao...