This session explores the power of speculative fiction to reimagine urban futures in the context of global warming. With examples from Johannesburg, Cape Town, Lagos, and Swansea, it will (1) showcase new methods for reading speculative fiction against the climate change action plans and reports that are increasingly being used to imagine and implement urban futures; (2) trace the ability of speculative fiction to critique and imagine alternatives to dominant visions of “smart,” “sustainable” and “resilient” cities; and (3) rethink notions of the “planetary city” that have been advanced in urban studies from literary and Global South perspectives.

While there has been extensive commentary on literature and climate change in recent decades (Craps, Fiskio, Heise, Johns-Putra, Mayer, Mehnert, Milner and Burgmann, Schneider- Mayerson, Streeby, Weik von Mossner), this panel takes the city as its unit of analysis. To do so recognizes the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s emphasis in their special report Climate Change and Cities (2027) that cities face urgent challenges from global warming, and are keys sites for mitigation and adaptation. Shifting the conventional focus of literary urban studies and complementing the broader movement in science fiction and fantasy studies away from Euro-American canons of literature (exemplified by Chattopadhyay, Dillon, Lavender III, and Taylor’s approach to “CoFuturisms”), this session turns to cities and literature from the Global South alongside a practical case-study from Swansea, Wales.

Rebecca Duncan’s paper “Ghosts and Coal in Urban South African Fiction” stems from her “Resources and Energy in South African Literature” project, funded by The Swedish Research Council (2024-2027). It addresses two novels of urban South Africa—Niq Mhlongo’s Way Back Home (2013) and Ashraf Kagee’s By the Fading Light (2021)—in which tropes of haunting indicate the violent effects and legacies of racial oppression as they structure South Africa’s coal-powered petromodernity. Duncan argues that the petro-hauntings in these novels position South African cities in a wider history and geography of coal-powered socio-ecological violence, and refigure the extractive hinterlands that characterize planetary cities.

Drawing on her expertise in contemporary African fiction and the “postsecular” turn in literary production, Rebekah Cumpsty examines the role of millenarian religious traditions in shaping urban climate imaginaries in Alistair Mackay’s It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way (2022). She argues that Mackay’s novel highlights the limitations of dominant, secular climate imaginaries by showcasing the coexistence of irreconcilable temporalities within the planetary city. By foregrounding millenarianism as a mode of world-making, this speculative fiction reveals that the planetary crisis is experienced not just as an environmental emergency, but as a theological event, which calls for new approaches to understanding urban futures in the Global South.

David Shackleton’s paper on urban informality reads Suyi Davies Okungbowa’s Lost Ark Dreaming (2024) alongside the Lagos Climate Action Plan. Both stage some of the complex, cascading and compounding climate risks that Lagos faces, but the novel contests the adaptation and mitigation strategies advanced in the action plan. It employs a dystopia to critique the controversial development of Eko Atlantic as a private coastal city that involves the clearing of informal settlements in the Makoko district. While the action plan uses a template that is designed for cities in the Global North and reinforces “owambe urbanism,” this paper argues that Africanfuturist fiction re-imagines informal urban futures for planetary cities.

Finally, Chris Pak explores how speculative fiction can inform approaches in urban planning, architecture, and design by sharing his experience of an interdisciplinary AHRC-funded project on biophilic living in Swansea. Informed by understandings of science fiction as a dialogic mode that privileges the ways texts are used (Broderick, 1995; Rieder, 2017), the project engages artists, schools, local communities and interest groups to co-create a range of creative productions to generate visions of possible biophilic futures. Pak argues that the humanities have a key role to play in envisioning biophilic urban living in the context of climate change.

Collectively, the panel traces how writers in the Global South are turning to speculative fiction to critique top-down planning schemes and reimagine urban futures, and how speculative methodologies might be used in urban planning and design. The four 12–15 minute provocation papers are intended to spark open discussion, including reflections on the relationship between literature and urban imaginaries, and on how speculative fiction takes the city as a key site for re-imagining planetary life.