There is a peculiar contradiction at the heart of modern sustainability culture. Never before have societies spoken so obsessively about environmental responsibility while simultaneously consuming, demolishing and discarding so much. We count carbon molecules with microscopic precision while entire urban districts disappear beneath excavators after barely a generation of use. We celebrate electric mobility while producing mountains of electronic waste, unrecoverable batteries and increasingly short-lived products. We praise efficiency while normalising disposability. Somewhere along the way, the sustainability-ideology lost contact with our reality.

This issue of topos is therefore not about denying climate change, nor dismissing the importance of emissions reduction. Carbon matters. Of course it does. But a civilisation capable of reducing atmospheric metrics while continuing to destroy oceans, landscapes, buildings, products and finite resources at industrial scale cannot honestly call itself sustainable. The defining challenge of the twenty-first century may not simply be how humanity emits less. It may be how humanity wastes less. That distinction matters enormously.

The Metabolism of the Modern City

Because cities are not spreadsheets. They are living systems built from matter, energy, labour, memory and human aspiration. Steel, copper, sand, timber, concrete, lithium, water and land do not magically appear because a sustainability report demands them. They are extracted, processed, transported and assembled through gigantic global infrastructures whose ecological and geopolitical consequences remain largely invisible to urban everyday life. According to the United Nations Environment Programme and the International Resource Panel, global material extraction has more than tripled since 1970 and continues to accelerate. The modern metropolis increasingly behaves like a combustion engine for resources.

Beyond Symbolic Environmentalism

And yet much of contemporary environmental discourse still revolves around symbolic behavioural morality. The car becomes the enemy. The bicycle becomes a quasi-religious object of salvation. Citizens are lectured about consumption while governments continue tolerating planned obsolescence, disposable construction and economic systems fundamentally dependent on permanent replacement cycles. Such thinking is not only intellectually insufficient. It is socially dangerous.

A truly sustainable city cannot become hostile toward its own inhabitants. It cannot become unaffordable, joyless or economically paralysed in pursuit of ideological purity. Human prosperity is not the enemy of sustainability. Human short-termism is. History demonstrates repeatedly that deprivation rarely produces stable environmental progress. Societies built around permanent sacrifice eventually collapse politically, economically or culturally.

The Case for Circularity

This is why circularity matters so profoundly. Circularity does not ask humanity to retreat from modernity. It asks modernity to become more intelligent. To preserve rather than constantly replace. To repair rather than discard. To adapt rather than demolish. To design buildings, products and infrastructures capable of surviving generations rather than investment cycles. The future city will not succeed because it consumes less visibly. It will succeed because it destroys less recklessly.

Perhaps the real environmental question of our century is therefore no longer whether humanity can continue building prosperous societies. It is whether humanity can finally learn how to keep prosperity itself in circulation.

I welcome letters of all kinds. Above all, of course, I particularly welcome those that address the future of our planet in a sovereign, intelligent, critical and technology-open manner.

Get the topos 135 – Circularity in Cities- here

Our latest issue explores the world of Rebels of Urbanism. Cities are supposed to be planned: orderly, efficient, sustainable. Streets must function, zones must align, development must follow strategies and guidelines. Yet urban life rarely unfolds according to plan. In the gaps between regulation and reality, people act. Someone plants tomatoes in a parking lot, transforms a vacant lot into a playground, or reclaims forgotten corners of the city. This issue of topos is dedicated to those moments. Rebels of Urbanism explores individuals and collectives who challenge urban conventions through action rather than permission. They see the city not as a finished design, but as an open system – imperfect, contested, and full of opportunities. From informal settlements that outsmart rigid planning to artists and activists who reinterpret public space, these stories reveal how small acts of resistance can reshape urban life. They remind us that cities are not only built by plans and policies, but also by imagination, persistence, and the courage to test the rules. .Read more in the editorial of topos 134 – Rebels of Urbanism.