Why Ibn Khaldun Still Matters for Urban Sustainability
Published in Earth & Environment and Philosophy & Religion
Our paper began with a deceptively simple question: What if the future of sustainable cities lies in the past?
In late 2022, amid a seminar on urban resilience and climate adaptation, we found ourselves returning—not to the latest climate report or city dashboard—but to a 14th-century polymath: Ibn Khaldun. Best known for The Muqaddimah, his writings explored how civilizations rise and fall not only through material strength, but through climate sensitivity, governance foresight, and what he called ‘asabiyyah—social cohesion.
At first, this felt like an intellectual detour. But as climate risks mount and many modern cities rely on increasingly energy-intensive interventions, Khaldun’s warning felt eerily timely: no civilization can endure if it loses its moral and ecological compass.
This paper was not easy to write. Interpreting a medieval framework through contemporary lenses required months of comparative reading and debate. We wrestled with balancing historical fidelity and modern relevance, resisting both romanticization and reduction. The breakthrough came when we juxtaposed three cities—Stockholm, Dubai, and Phoenix—as case studies to test Khaldun’s theory of climate zones and civilizational dynamics in real-world contexts.
We found that while technological innovation can buffer climate extremes, true resilience is rooted in governance models that align with nature and people. Stockholm’s participatory urbanism stands in contrast to Dubai’s engineered defiance of desert heat and Phoenix’s mixed strategies. Each illustrates, in its own way, the risks and rewards of trying to “build against” versus “build with” nature.
Beyond the cities themselves, this work is also about disciplines meeting each other halfway. A geographer, a cultural theorist, and a scholar of Muslim diasporas might seem like unlikely collaborators. But it’s this convergence that allowed us to see Ibn Khaldun not just as a historian of his time, but as a theorist for our time.
We hope this paper opens a dialogue—not only on how to plan more sustainable cities, but on whose knowledge counts in sustainability science. History, especially non-Western intellectual traditions, has much to offer if we are willing to listen.
If we’ve learned anything, it’s this: The sustainability of cities may hinge less on how smart their buildings are, and more on how wisely they are governed—and how deeply they are rooted in shared values. Ibn Khaldun understood that. The question is: do we?
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