A balanced position is often the hardest one to hold in public debate. Most discussions about artificial intelligence are pulled toward two extreme poles: the hype-driven optimists who exaggerate AI’s promise, and the doomsday pessimists who amplify its dangers beyond reason. Both positions are loud, emotionally satisfying, and easy to perform. Both are also incomplete.

The optimist imagines AI as a near-magical force that will transform everything for the better. In this view, AI is a solution to productivity, creativity, medicine, education, and even governance. The pessimist, by contrast, sees AI as a destabilizing threat: a technology that will destroy jobs, concentrate power, flood society with misinformation, and perhaps even endanger humanity itself. Neither position is entirely wrong. The problem is that both are usually pushed to the point of distortion.

What makes this especially difficult is that the two extremes are not merely arguments. They are identities. They are performances. They are emotional shelters. The optimist and the pessimist often need each other, because each side’s exaggeration helps validate the other’s. The future-tech evangelist needs the warning voice in order to appear visionary. The alarmist needs the hype machine in order to appear sober and prophetic. Together they create a kind of public theatre in which nuance is the first casualty.

This is the real paradox of AI discourse. The technology is new, powerful, and still unfolding. Yet our reaction to it follows familiar human habits. We are drawn to certainty, even when certainty is not justified. We prefer dramatic conclusions to careful uncertainty. We reward the people who sound most confident, not necessarily the people who are most correct. As a result, AI becomes less a subject of rational analysis and more a stage for competing psychological needs.

The persistence of the extremes is not simply a matter of ignorance. It is also a function of human cognition. We are wired to overreact to threats and to overestimate opportunities. Negativity bias makes us focus on what could go wrong. Novelty bias makes us overvalue what seems revolutionary. AI activates both at the same time. It looks like a promise and a warning simultaneously, which is exactly why so many people talk past one another when they discuss it.

The pessimist treats AI like a fire alarm. Once the alarm sounds, the only instinct is to run, shout, and panic before checking whether there is actually a fire. The optimist treats AI like a finished sculpture: polished, complete, and ready to be admired from a distance. But AI is neither an alarm nor a sculpture. It is more like wet clay. It can be shaped, bent, misused, improved, hardened, or broken. It is unfinished. That means our response should also be unfinished, adaptive, and grounded in evidence.

This is where pragmatism enters. Pragmatism is not a weak compromise between two strong positions. It is not a lukewarm middle that tries to keep everyone happy. It is a disciplined way of thinking that asks what actually works under specific conditions. It judges claims by results, not by emotional intensity. It accepts that a technology can be useful and dangerous at the same time. It resists the temptation to make AI into either salvation or catastrophe.

Holding that middle ground is difficult because it offers less emotional reward. The optimist gets the rush of prophecy. The pessimist gets the satisfaction of warning others before disaster strikes. Both positions can make a person feel intellectually superior. Both allow someone to say, “I see what others do not.” Pragmatism is less glamorous. It does not promise applause. It requires patience, humility, and the willingness to change your mind as evidence changes. That is exactly why it is valuable.

The hard-won middle is also the only position that treats AI as a real system rather than a symbol. A pragmatic view asks: what task is AI doing? Under what conditions does it help? Under what conditions does it fail? What safeguards are in place? Who benefits? Who is harmed? What feedback loops exist? What governance mechanisms are missing? These are not exciting questions, but they are the correct ones.

A useful way to think about AI is through the metaphor of a knife. A knife can perform surgery or cause injury. The tool itself is not the moral answer. The answer lies in who holds it, for what purpose, in what setting, and with what oversight. AI is similar. It is not automatically good or bad. Its effects depend on context, restraint, monitoring, and institutional design. A conditional approach is therefore more honest than a categorical one. It says, “AI can be beneficial if X safeguards exist, and dangerous if Y protections are absent.”

The same logic applies to the broader public debate. The optimist and the pessimist are not really fighting over facts. They are fighting over which possibility to animate. The optimist points to a gleaming demo and sees a future of abundance. The pessimist points to a plausible disaster and sees a future of collapse. Both are describing potential futures, not settled realities. The question is not whether possibility exists. The question is which possibility we prepare for, and how.

This is why the sculpture and the clay matter as metaphors. The optimist sees the sculpture and forgets the clay beneath it, the labor, the mess, the revisions, the unfinished work. The pessimist sees the clay and assumes it will never become anything useful. Pragmatism sees both. It recognizes that the sculpture was once clay, and that clay only becomes meaningful through patient shaping. AI is in that stage now. It is not finished, and it is not formless. It is a material in motion.

This also helps explain why the debate so often feels theatrical. The optimist performs as the visionary prophet. The pessimist performs as the lone truth-teller. Each role is seductive because it offers a clear moral identity. One gets to be the bearer of hope; the other gets to be the bearer of warning. But both roles depend on exaggeration. Both are energized by contrast. And both are weakened by the arrival of a third voice that says, in effect, “Let’s examine the evidence first.”

That third voice is the pragmatist. The pragmatist does not deny AI’s promise, and does not dismiss its threat. Instead, the pragmatist asks what institutional, technical, and ethical structures must exist for AI to be used well. This includes regulation, auditing, transparency, accountability, and continuous revision. It also includes the recognition that governance is not static. As the technology evolves, so must the oversight around it.

History gives us many examples of technologies that carried both promise and peril. The printing press democratized knowledge, but it also destabilized authority and helped fuel religious conflict. Electricity transformed industry and daily life, but it also caused early accidents and required entirely new safety systems. The Haber-Bosch process helped feed billions by enabling fertilizer production, but it also contributed to the manufacture of explosives. In each case, the technology was not simply a blessing or a curse. It was a double-edged breakthrough.

AI fits this pattern. It can improve diagnosis in medicine, streamline research, expand access to education, and support productivity across sectors. It can also displace workers, intensify surveillance, reproduce bias, and flood public discourse with synthetic content. The fact that these two outcomes coexist is not a contradiction. It is the nature of powerful tools. The real question is whether society can shape institutions quickly enough to maximize the gains while limiting the harms.

This is why the “middle” is not a place of indecision. It is a place of responsibility. It requires more work than either extreme. It asks people to resist the emotional pull of easy answers. It demands that policymakers, engineers, business leaders, and citizens stay with the uncomfortable truth that AI is not one thing. It will not be uniformly liberating or uniformly destructive. It will be what we allow it to become.

That means the future of AI will not be decided by slogans. It will be decided by governance. It will depend on whether institutions can enforce standards, whether companies can be held accountable, whether workers can adapt, whether education systems can respond, and whether the public can remain informed enough to judge claims critically. In other words, the real issue is not whether AI is inherently good or evil. The real issue is whether we can build the right structures around it.

We should be suspicious of anyone who speaks about AI only in absolutes. The true believer wants to sell inevitability. The doom speaker wants to sell fear. Both simplify a complicated reality into a message that is easier to repeat. But the world is rarely that simple. If we want AI to serve human purposes, we need less performance and more calibration. Less rhetoric and more evidence. Less prophecy and more practical design.

Pragmatism is not glamorous. It will not always go viral. It does not produce the satisfying certainty that extreme positions offer. But it is the only approach that keeps us close to reality. And reality is where good decisions are made.

AI is not a miracle and it is not a monster. It is a powerful, unfinished tool. Whether it becomes broadly beneficial or deeply harmful will depend less on its existence than on the systems we build around it. That is the core paradox of our time, and the reason the middle ground matters.

The hard task is not choosing between blind faith and blind fear. The hard task is learning how to shape the clay.

The renewed debate over China’s so-called excess capacity is about far more than industrial overproduction. It is, in essence, a contest over who gets to define fairness in a global economy that is increasingly shaped by geopolitics, protectionism and anxiety about shifting power. Beijing’s latest position paper on the issue argues that accusations against China are distorted, selective and often driven by political motives rather than economic logic. Whether one fully accepts that argument or not, the document exposes a deeper and more uncomfortable truth: the industrial order that once produced global growth is now under strain, and the language of “excess capacity” is becoming a weapon in that struggle.

At first glance, the term sounds technical and neutral. But in practice, it is highly political. When industrial powers complain that China is flooding world markets with cheap steel, electric vehicles, solar panels or batteries, they are not only describing trade flows. They are also defending domestic industries, protecting strategic sectors and trying to slow down a competitor that has become too successful for comfort. China’s response is predictable: it says its industrial rise is the product of innovation, large-scale production and deep integration into global supply chains, not artificial state support alone.

This is where the debate becomes complicated. Beijing is not wrong to point out that global manufacturing has never been static. Production has moved from Britain to the United States, from the West to Japan, then to East Asia and China, and now partly onward to Southeast Asia and other regions. That movement is a feature of globalization, not a defect. Industrial change always creates winners and losers, and every major wave of technological transformation has generated complaints about too much capacity in one place and too little in another. What feels like overcapacity from one capital often looks like competitiveness from another.

The problem is that the current controversy is not occurring in an era of trust. It is unfolding in a period of tariff wars, subsidy races and strategic decoupling. Western governments increasingly promote industrial policy when it suits their own needs while condemning similar behavior elsewhere. They subsidize green industries, semiconductor production and advanced manufacturing at home, yet accuse China of distorting markets when its firms do what global firms have always done: scale up, cut costs and capture market share. That double standard weakens the moral authority of the criticism.

Still, China’s defense should not be accepted uncritically. The fact that industrial competition is normal does not mean all market distortions are imaginary. Large subsidies, opaque support systems and state-backed expansion can affect prices, investment decisions and trade balances. For countries trying to rebuild industry after years of deindustrialization, the arrival of cheaper imports can feel less like competition and more like suffocation. That concern is especially acute in the developing world, where industrial policy space is limited and local firms often cannot survive prolonged exposure to subsidized global giants. The challenge, then, is not to deny excess capacity debates outright, but to place them within a fairer and more transparent framework.

China’s argument that trade surpluses do not automatically mean excess capacity is also economically reasonable. A country can run a surplus because of savings patterns, exchange rates, industrial specialization or global demand for its products. Surplus alone is not evidence of wrongdoing. Germany and Japan have long been trade surpluses economies, and no serious analyst would describe every export success as proof of systemic imbalance. The same logic should apply to China.

If its exports of electric vehicles, batteries and solar panels are booming, that may reflect global demand for affordable green technology as much as any domestic policy.

Yet Beijing’s own language reveals the strategic stakes. The document repeatedly frames China not as a threat but as “China opportunity 2.0,” presenting its industrial rise as a benefit to the world. That is a smart political move, because it shifts the conversation away from confrontation and toward shared gains. There is some truth in it. Chinese manufacturing has lowered the cost of goods, accelerated the spread of clean energy technologies and helped many developing countries access industrial equipment they could not otherwise afford. For Africa, Asia and Latin America, this has often been a practical advantage, not a theoretical one.

But opportunity does not erase dependence. A world economy that relies too heavily on one industrial powerhouse is vulnerable to shocks, policy shifts and supply disruptions. That is why the answer to China’s rise should not be simple resistance or blind acceptance. It should be diversification, stronger domestic production capacity and smarter regional cooperation. African countries, in particular, should read this debate carefully. The question is not whether China is too strong; it is whether African economies are building enough industrial depth to engage China on better terms. If not, the continent risks remaining a passive consumer of finished goods rather than an active participant in the next phase of manufacturing.

This matters for trade policy in the Horn of Africa and beyond. Countries in the region need investment in energy, logistics, transport and industrial parks that can turn trade into transformation. If Chinese capital helps build roads, factories and power networks, that is welcome. But if imports simply crowd out local production without building local capability, then the long-term gains will be limited. The same debate over “capacity” should therefore be used by African policymakers to ask a harder question: which industrial partnerships create value at home, and which only deepen dependency?

In the end, the excess capacity debate is less about one country than about the future of globalization itself. If the world is moving toward fragmentation, then industrial policy will increasingly be judged not by efficiency alone but by strategic loyalty. If the world still wants openness, then countries must accept that competition produces winners and losers, and that success in trade cannot always be separated from political discomfort. China’s position paper is a forceful reminder that economic disputes are now being fought with ideological tools. The real test is whether the rest of the world can respond with principles rather than slogans.

A healthier global economy would not treat every export success as a threat, nor every subsidy as a scandal. It would demand transparency, enforce fair rules and leave enough space for development at different stages. That is the standard worth defending. China may be right that the excess capacity narrative is often abused. But the deeper issue is not whether the label is fair. It is whether the international system can still manage industrial rivalry without turning cooperation into permanent confrontation.

A Lesson Before the Argument

There are cities that seem, for a brief moment in history, to embody the future. In February 1984, Sarajevo was one of them. For two weeks, the capital of socialist Yugoslavia became the center of the world, as television cameras followed skiers down the slopes of Igman, watched bobsleds thunder through the curves of Trebević, and lingered over a skyline where Ottoman minarets stood beside Austro-Hungarian facades and socialist apartment blocks overlooked medieval streets. Cafés filled with Muslims, Serbs, Croats, and Jews suggested that diversity could be lived, not merely proclaimed. The Winter Olympics announced Sarajevo as a confident, modern capital.

Less than a decade later, those same venues had acquired entirely different meanings. The bobsled track became a military position. The stadium hosted funerals instead of competitions. Apartment blocks that had symbolized urban progress were reduced to shells by artillery fire, during nearly four years of the longest siege of a capital city in modern history. The obvious explanation is war. It is also an incomplete one. Wars destroy cities every year, yet some recover quickly while others lose not only their buildings but the social fabric that gave those buildings meaning. Sarajevo’s tragedy was not simply that its infrastructure was damaged. It was that the political and civic foundations capable of protecting that infrastructure had already fractured, in the relationships between citizens, institutions, and the state, long before the first shell landed on an Olympic venue. Concrete was merely the final casualty.

That distinction matters because cities are usually judged by what can be photographed. Governments inaugurate highways, parks, and boulevards because these are visible expressions of ambition; far less visible are the investments that determine whether those achievements still matter thirty years later — schools that cultivate skilled workers, institutions that command public trust, jobs that give young people reasons to remain, and political systems that persuade competing communities they hold an equal stake in the future. These unfold slowly and produce no ceremonies, yet history suggests they are what every successful city ultimately depends on. I do not raise Sarajevo to suggest Ethiopia is destined to repeat Bosnia’s tragedy — the two countries differ too profoundly in history, institutions, and conflict for that comparison to hold. I raise it because it proves something more useful than any direct comparison could: cities are built twice — first with concrete and steel, then with educated, economically secure, and socially invested citizens. Without the second construction, the first remains vulnerable no matter how impressive it looks on the day the ribbon is cut. If infrastructure is the visible face of development, the social contract between citizens and the state is its invisible foundation, and no amount of cement can substitute for it.

That is the argument of this article, stated plainly: infrastructure is a necessary condition for national development, but human development, the education, employment, trust, and inclusion that allow a society to sustain what it builds, is the sufficient condition for making that development last. Everything that follows is evidence for that single proposition, not a list of separate complaints.

That lesson feels unexpectedly relevant today, in another capital undergoing a remarkable physical reinvention. Few visitors returning to Addis Ababa after a decade away fail to notice how profoundly the city has changed. Roads once permanently congested have been widened, public squares redesigned, parks planted where neglected spaces once stood, and historic districts restored under the Prosperity Party’s corridor development program, Sheger Park, Friendship Square, the renewal of Piassa, the reconstruction of Churchill Road. Whether one supports the government or opposes it, intellectual honesty requires acknowledging the scale of this transformation is extraordinary. International conferences increasingly use the city as their venue; tourists and investors now encounter a capital eager to present itself as one of the continent’s emerging metropolitan destinations, and after decades in which Ethiopia abroad was often synonymous with famine, conflict, or crisis, there is understandable pride in seeing the capital recognized for something more hopeful. None of that should be dismissed. Better roads reduce the cost of moving goods and people; attractive cities encourage tourism and investment. Physical infrastructure is not an indulgence, it is one foundation of economic development, and countries that neglect it rarely prosper.

What Concrete Cannot Do

Acknowledging that truth, however, should allow us to ask a harder question: what ultimately determines whether such investments keep generating prosperity long after the construction crews leave? The answer has surprisingly little to do with concrete. Concrete has no memory. Every generation must decide whether it will inherit a city or merely occupy it. Bridges do not inspect themselves. Parks do not generate the tax revenue required for their upkeep. Every physical achievement ultimately depends on something less visible: the capabilities of the people who inherit it. For the sake of precision, I mean something specific by human development, productive employment, quality education, civic trust, political inclusion, and social mobility. Every example that follows in this article is a failure or success in one of those five categories, not a free-floating grievance. Education determines who designs tomorrow’s cities. Employment determines who can afford to sustain them. Trust determines whether citizens treat public property as a shared inheritance or someone else’s possession. Political inclusion determines whether development is experienced as a common project or as one group’s achievement at another’s expense. History repeatedly demonstrates that infrastructure is a necessary condition for prosperity. It is rarely the sufficient one.

Perhaps the most underestimated cost of infrastructure is not construction but maintenance. Every bridge, park, public square, and transport corridor eventually demands engineers, technicians, municipal managers, tax revenue, and institutions capable of keeping it functional. Countries do not become wealthy simply because they build infrastructure. They become wealthy because they build societies capable of maintaining it.

That distinction may sound abstract until one asks a simpler question: what keeps a city alive once the cranes disappear? Construction is an event. Development is a process. A government can widen a highway in three years; it cannot educate an engineer in three years. A bridge may open with a ribbon-cutting ceremony, but the institutions that inspect its safety, collect the taxes that finance its upkeep, and train whoever repairs it are built over decades. Sociologists working in the institutional tradition would call this complementarity: infrastructure and human capital multiply each other’s value rather than substituting for it. A road connects a farmer to a market only if that farmer has the capital, literacy, and trust to use it productively; a corridor without a skilled workforce simply moves goods more efficiently toward a market that still cannot absorb them. Infrastructure creates opportunity. Whether societies convert that opportunity into prosperity depends on the capabilities of the people who inherit it, an insight that, more than any engineering blueprint, explains why some countries grow richer generation after generation while others merely accumulate physical assets. A road expands what is possible; education determines who can seize it.

One reason post-war Germany, Japan, and South Korea are remembered as development success stories is not simply because they rebuilt quickly, but because they rebuilt people as deliberately as they rebuilt cities. Their roads accelerated prosperity because millions of educated, economically secure people knew how to use them productively, infrastructure did not replace human development, it amplified it. History is full of cities whose infrastructure outlived the political and economic systems that gave it purpose. Buildings rarely become obsolete before the societies supporting them do. Infrastructure seldom fails first. Societies do. A state that has proven, in record time, that it can build roads has not thereby proven it can build the institutions those roads depend on, universities, professional civil services, and independent courts take decades to build and can be undone far faster than they were created, because trust is not something a corridor project can manufacture on a construction schedule.

Where the Foundation Is Being Tested

If this sounds theoretical, Ethiopia already offers several practical tests of the argument. The National Dialogue Commission, established in 2022 to build national consensus after years of conflict and polarization, has been assessed by independent analysts,  including researchers at the Clingendael Institute and the Institute for Security Studies, as undermined by its own exclusions, with armed groups and significant opposition figures remaining outside the process, a gap the Commission’s own chief commissioner has publicly acknowledged. A nation cannot ask citizens to invest emotionally in a shared future if parts of that society remain uncertain the conversation includes them; reconciliation is part of the social infrastructure every other development project depends on. A related question runs through the continuing dispute over Addis Ababa’s constitutional status. It is often framed as a legal argument over Article 49, which names Addis Ababa the federal capital while granting Oromia a “special interest” in the city, language two sides now read in irreconcilable ways, with Oromo activists and officials insisting the city’s land will not be negotiated away, and many other Ethiopians, including figures inside the Prosperity Party’s own ranks, regarding Addis Ababa as shared national ground belonging to no single group. Beneath that constitutional argument lies a deeper question of belonging: who sees Addis Ababa as their city, and can a capital undergoing unprecedented transformation become a place its people experience as a common home rather than a prize in a political contest? Even the frustrations surrounding condominium housing reveal something larger than administrative inefficiency. Thousands of Ethiopians who spent years, in some documented cases close to two decades, contributing to government housing schemes have found themselves bypassed, delayed, or caught in disputed lottery draws later annulled for credibility concerns; in one case, more than seven thousand completed units sat unoccupied for years because promised infrastructure was never finished, prompting Ethiopia’s own Ombudsman to formally intervene. For those citizens, the issue is not simply a delayed apartment; it is whether patience and participation in public institutions are rewarded, and when citizens doubt that, the damage extends well beyond housing policy. These three threads are not identical and should not be forced into one political narrative, but together they illuminate a question that receives far less attention than the next redevelopment announcement: is Ethiopia investing as deliberately in the relationships that bind citizens to one another and the state as it is investing in the roads and buildings reshaping its capital? Because if development ultimately rests on a social contract, then every investment in concrete should be matched by an equally serious investment in trust.

People protect what they believe belongs to them, a simple idea, easy to underestimate. Development becomes durable when citizens experience it as something they are building together, and fragile when they experience it as something being done to them. The strongest foundation beneath any city, in the end, is not concrete but ownership. Reports of displacement connected to corridor development have generated real public concern, and whether every individual account proves accurate matters less than the underlying principle: a city beautified over the resentment of the people displaced to build it has not solved its underlying problem, only postponed it. This is felt most acutely by Ethiopia’s young people. A beautifully designed city cannot substitute for the expectation of a future. Boulevards do not remove the anxiety of unemployment; restored public squares do not replace confidence that education will lead to opportunity. Societies remain stable not because every citizen is equally prosperous, but because most believe tomorrow offers more possibility than yesterday. Hope may be the most important infrastructure a country possesses, because people rarely abandon roads they believe lead somewhere.I am not an urban planner, and I do not claim the standing to evaluate traffic modeling or drainage engineering; what I bring instead is more than a decade in youth development and civic engagement, and from that vantage point I would add only this, young people do not stay in a city because its sidewalks are attractive. They stay because they can imagine a future in it.

The question, in any case, is larger than Addis Ababa. A nation of Ethiopia’s size and diversity cannot build its future through one capital alone. South Africa’s economy is not carried by Johannesburg alone but by Cape Town and Durban as well; China’s rise was not built on Beijing and Shanghai in isolation but on a network of cities each developing its own comparative advantage. Ethiopia has its own version of this potential. A genuinely resilient strategy would treat Addis Ababa as one part of a broader network of thriving regional cities, an economic imperative and a political one, since societies stay cohesive when citizens believe the future belongs to them wherever they live, and grow fragile when prosperity appears concentrated in places that feel distant from their own lives.

None of this is an argument for slowing Ethiopia’s development; it is an argument for making that development more durable. Public debate often imagines a false choice between infrastructure and people, as though every kilometer of road comes at the expense of a classroom. History suggests the opposite. Great cities are rarely remembered for their buildings alone, Paris did not become Paris simply because boulevards were constructed under Haussmann, and Seoul is not admired merely for its highways. In each case, physical investment unfolded alongside sustained commitment to education and expanding opportunity, until the skyline became a symbol of a development the society had already begun to earn.

Which brings this back, one final time, to Sarajevo. When the world watched the Winter Olympics in 1984, it saw a beautiful city. What it could not see were the fractures already forming beneath the surface. Buildings can conceal division for a time; boulevards can create the appearance of confidence. None of that substitutes for a society in which citizens genuinely believe they share a future. That is Sarajevo’s enduring lesson, not that beautiful cities inevitably fall, and not that Ethiopia is destined to repeat another country’s tragedy, because history is never that deterministic. The lesson is simpler and more demanding: cities are not ultimately sustained by concrete. They are sustained by the relationships that concrete is meant to serve. As Ethiopia builds a capital worthy of the twenty-first century, the real question is whether it is building a society capable of sustaining it through the twenty-second, whether today’s investments are cultivating educated citizens, trusted institutions, and a political community broad enough that Ethiopians from every background see themselves reflected in the country’s future. Those are not alternatives to infrastructure. They are the conditions that allow infrastructure to endure. Fifty years from now, few will remember how many kilometers of corridor were completed; what future generations will remember is whether this was the moment Ethiopia transformed the appearance of its capital, or transformed the capabilities of its people with equal determination. One day the cranes now dominating Addis Ababa’s skyline will disappear. That is what cranes do. The more enduring question is what will remain after they are gone. If Ethiopia succeeds in building not only boulevards but also educated citizens, trusted institutions, and a shared national future, then today’s construction boom will be remembered as the beginning of something far larger than urban renewal. If it does not, history suggests that even the most impressive skylines cannot carry a society farther than the people prepared to sustain them. Cities are first imagined by architects. They endure because generations of citizens choose to keep imagining them together.

Between June 20 and 28, a powerful heat wave hit Europe, creating the conditions that have fueled the wildfires now raging across large swathes of France and Spain. Soon after the June heat wave, city officials in Rome announced a new, scientifically informed operational strategy to prepare for a hotter world. As with other such efforts in Europe, the heat plan includes emergency responses for the vulnerable, green public spaces, more water fountains, climate shelters, investments in grid resilience, and so forth.

This is not the Eternal City’s first heat initiative. Rome previously rolled out a heat health warning system in 2002, in time for the 2003 heat wave that killed 70,000 people across Europe (including more than 1,000 in Rome). After that, Rome and many other cities enacted emergency plans to provide early warning systems, register vulnerable people, and prepare hospitals. But when a massive heat wave struck in 2022, those two decades of emergency planning proved inadequate. Another 60,000 people died.

Once again, governments announced structural responses such as school closures, event cancellations, and outdoor labor regulations. But while they had some positive effect, this year’s heat wave showed that Europe is still far behind the curve.

The problem is that we are chasing a moving target. Heat waves are becoming more frequent, prolonged, and intense, and this trend has exacerbated other risks. For example, heat waves create ideal conditions for forest fires, which have now hit several countries in southern Europe. They also lead us to overlook increasingly common extreme precipitation, with frequent destructive floods becoming a fact of life, often in the very same places suffering heat waves. Since anthropogenic climate change is the cause of all this, zeroing out greenhouse-gas emissions is the route to stabilization. But until then, current conditions will worsen.

Following major floods in 2023, I argued that a new frontier was coming into view. Europe would need to orchestrate a constitutional response to its shifting material conditions, with a state-led program to transform its economy. Three years and many floods and heat waves later, the frontier is upon us, yet we are still behaving as if nothing has changed. Focusing only on emergency planning, disaster response, and recovery after each catastrophe may fit the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s definition of building “resilience”; but resilience is no longer enough.

That is why I have long focused on the broader, evolving relationship between economic development and the environment. Over the years, country after country has written the story of its future by transforming its landscape. Consider the hydro-infrastructural transformation of the American West during the Progressive Era; Sun Yat-sen’s blueprint for Chinese modernization on the Yangtze; Italy’s extensive land reclamation and hydropower development to support industrialization; Jawaharlal Nehru’s dams, “modern temples of India” that served as symbols of economic emancipation; and Park Chung-hee’s spatial reorganization of the South Korean economy in service of export-led growth.

In The Environmental Republic, I argue that, despite all their mistakes and distortionary effects, these efforts hold a crucial lesson. In changing material conditions, resilience cannot just be about “weathering the storm.” It must be a property of how we grow. The transformation that climate change makes necessary will be of comparable scale and scope to those pursued over the last century.

Consider the energy system. During the June 2026 heat wave, air-conditioner use pushed Rome toward its daily peak electricity capacity of 2.1 GW, and localized blackouts followed. The grid proved inadequate, even though Italy has been investing in it. There is still too little spare capacity; natural gas dominates production; the hydropower share of production is itself vulnerable to climate change; and a significant share of distribution is underground, where thermal stresses from accumulated heat damage cables.

The solution is not simply to fix each of these individual problems. It requires mapping Italy’s long-term energy future. Like many European economies, Italy is suffering declining competitiveness. It needs to find space for innovation and comparative advantage in a global economy that is adopting the tools of 21st-century industrialization: electrification, renewables, automation, and AI. The spatial distribution of that transformation will define the future economy’s network needs, which will both drive grid modernization and pay for it.

Europe faces challenges like this around every corner. Its median age is now 45, with a pensioner for every three workers. By the end of the century, one-third of Europeans will be over 65, the age cohort most vulnerable to heat-induced mortality. But a shrinking workforce with declining productivity obviously cannot support welfare services on the scale that people are used to. The solution must be vastly higher productivity, a larger working-age population, or a combination of the two.

As it happens, the median age in Africa, just across the Mediterranean, is under 20, and the continent’s total population will swell to 2.5 billion by 2050. Politics aside, the conditions for an extraordinarily beneficial partnership are in place. But accommodating migration on any significant scale and sustaining the increase in related trade will have profound territorial consequences. New social housing, transportation infrastructure, and services will add to challenges already facing cities like Rome, Vienna, and Paris. Now open-air museums to Europe’s cultural legacy, these metropolitan centers were modernized with infrastructure designed for a different society, economy, and material conditions.

When asked what made Singapore—transformed from a resource-poor local port into a global hub in the space of a generation—so successful, its founding leader, Lee Kuan Yew, famously answered: “Air conditioning.” He understood that modernity’s most consequential gift has been the control of material conditions.

Europe can no longer afford to treat climate change as a background trend that is unfolding while we are making other plans. Shifting material conditions are the new normal. History tells us that such challenges can be overcome only through transformations on a societal scale. Europe must think much bigger, aiming not for mere resilience but for resilient growth.