Ashley Dawson

Ashley Dawson is professor of English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and at the College of Staten Island, and one of the most widely read essayists on cities and the climate crisis. His literary and postcolonial background, with books on multicultural Britain and empire, turned to climate after Hurricane Sandy, which flooded his city in 2012 and showed that the hardest-hit neighbourhoods were the poorest and the furthest from protective investment.

Extreme Cities (2017) is his central book. It argues that the large coastal cities, from New York to Jakarta, concentrate at once emissions, capital and exposed population, and that the dominant response, resilience understood as sea walls and protected luxury real estate, is a form of climate apartheid. Against it he describes disaster communism, the mutual aid that emerged with Occupy Sandy, and defends managed retreat from flood zones and the democratic decarbonisation of the city.

In Extinction (2016) he linked the sixth extinction to the history of capitalism, and in People's Power (2020) he proposed treating energy as a commons, with examples of cooperatives and remunicipalisations. Environmentalism from Below (2024) gathers the environmental movements of the Global South. He is reproached for a militant tone that neglects technical detail; his answer is that technique without politics has already decided who gets saved.