Bruce Sterling on the next 50 years of climate-wracked maker architecture

Bruce Sterling's hour-long lecture to the Southern California Institute of Architecture is pretty good vintage Sterling: a seeming grab-bag of loosely related futuristic, ascerbic observations about climate change, Estonian e-residency, Kazakh new cities, monumental architecture, rotting Turinese palaces, Silicon Valley arrogance, AI, new-new urbanism, and so on -- which then all seems to pull together in an ineffable, somehow coherent finale that is both hopeful and bitter.

Sterling discusses current situations that suggest issues that could be significant in thirty years, including:

Chinas terraforming projects in the South China Sea, and the Belt and Road Initiative.

Astana, Kazakhstan, which Sterling describes as neither Fatehpur Sikri nor Braslia, nor the future, but a possibility.

Dubai as a technocratic autocracy that will not become a hegemon but an entrept of futurity

Sterling discusses Estonias e-residency initiative as an architectural problem that that will become common in the future, requiring off-shore pop-ups promoting Virtual Estonia, physical bank/embassy registration sites, a physical headquarters within Estonia, plus the physical structures required by virtual enterprises.

In Estonias capital Tallinn, Sterling discovered another architectural problem of the mid-21st century: abandoned, failed megastructures, located in sites that will probably be flodded, such as the Lenin Palace of Culture and Sports (Raine Karp and Riina Altme, 1980).Seasteading, which Sterling dismisses as impractical.

Sterling also criticizes efforts of architects to design around the problem of climate-change flooding as architectural solutionism.

Sterling considers one result of rising sea levels will be a global proliferation of unregulated squatter districts like Christiania, in Copenhagen: wet favelas detached from municipal services.