Given the comparable shortsightedness that plagues city planning initiatives across the world, it would be easy to fall into the sort of end times fatalism that often accompanies discussions of likely climate futures (and it is a credit to Dawson's book that he stops short of this, keeping in mind the vulnerable populations that will inevitably have to live through catastrophe). 1 If Fukushima came as a surprise, the endgame of catastrophic meltdown is being built into Turkey Point by local officials from the get-go. Pulling from the insights of local scientists, Dawson elucidates the near certainty that the site will ' radioactive water into the surroundings' and, despite demanding constant cooling and maintenance, will eventually become 'accessible only by boat,' making responsible upkeep and management effectively impossible. Citing the 2011 Fukushima meltdown, Dawson considers likely scenarios for the site, on which there are currently plans to add further reactors. To draw out a particularly maddening instance of this sort of shortsightedness, Dawson considers Turkey Point, a nuclear power plant situated on a barrier island just south of Miami.

The titular 'capital sinks' are the ongoing investments that financiers and city officials regularly sink into new seaside buildings, artificial islands, and other planned spaces likely to exacerbate the damage, death, and contamination that coastal flooding will almost certainly bring about. Surveying a range of recent proposals and projects in New York, Miami, and Jakarta, most of which lie somewhere between rhetorically well-couched half measures against city carbon consumption and startling instances of willful blindness to future sea level rise, Dawson's account makes painfully clear that the relative inaction or even disregard for the oncoming effects of present city plans is continuing to set the seeds for a catastrophic future. In a chapter titled 'Capital Sinks,' Ashley Dawson, in his 2017 book Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change, lays out a sobering vision of the present and future of urban planning and its responses to the effects of climate change.

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