Welcome to Edifice

Welcome to Edifice, a platform about how infrastructure is, quite literally, shaping the future of the planet: rivers are being widened and reversed, countryside farms are moving into urban skyscrapers, and beaches are turning into sea walls. Infrastructure, in its response to climate change, will shape the sky, the sea, and everything in between.

Edifice aims to be a hub for research and journalism that unearths the technologies, policies, and finances of the infrastructure that promises to prepare us for a changing climate.

This platform is not about how the climate is changing or that climate change is bad or that we are all going to die (there are probably too many of those). It is about how humans have attempted to adapt to climate change and how we will continue to do so, in all its incredible capacity, imagination, and sometimes hubris.

Edifice will publish a weekly newsletter and biweekly feature stories showcasing this range of ideas, from the most promising and scalable to absurd and ridiculous. Think floating homes, desert hydrology, eco-metropolises, cloud seeding, and so much more.

There is an immeasurable amount of beauty in the imagination that gave us vertical farming, micro-reactors, sequestration equipment, and photovoltaics. This publication will seek out those gems (and explain them). But for every one shining example, there are twenty that are wasting material and human resources. This publication will also seek to expose those.

Why “Edifice”?

In its literal sense, the word “edifice” refers to an imposing building. This publication is about the imposition of infrastructure that maintains our modern world: it’s about making sure the rivers don’t flood, that transportation and supply chains stay intact, and that our homes remain as safe as they feel.

But downstream from survival, infrastructure is also about perception and imagination. In its more lyrical sense, the word “edifice” connotes complexity. Infrastructural adaptation is one of the most entangled concepts, grounded within opaque ecosystem dynamics, unpredictable atmospheric patterns, and invisible externalities. There are as many viable solutions as there are ideological and financial disagreements.

Who are we?

We are two writers/researchers with too many thoughts and questions for a WhatsApp thread. We want to share the stories we find fascinating, and we want to use this platform to figure out what exactly makes them so fascinating. Above all, we want to be conscious spectators of a changing world, and we think you might want to as well. But if you need our credentials, that’s also fair. You can find our bios in the About section.