This book has sought to illuminate the centuries-old conflict between habitation and improvement. Improvements in the form of technological advances have frequently undermined the habitation of many people. I have tried to show, however, that we have the possibility of channeling improvements in directions that would actually improve the habitation for all people. But this potential is not being realized within the existing political-economic constraints that drastically limit the ability of people to shape their own communities. The urgent task is to democratize the creation of habitation and this requires reforms that allow people to exercise greater control over the soft and hard infrastructures of the communities in which they live.

The intensification of the climate crisis has made the task of democratizing habitation ever more urgent. Climate scientists have been warning for decades of the dangers of continuing to pump more and more greenhouse gases into the earth's atmosphere, but it has only been in the decade of the 2020s that the negative consequences have become undeniably obvious. Extreme heat, uncontrollable wild fires that darken the sky for thousands of miles, devastating droughts, ever more powerful hurricanes, typhoons and tornadoes, floods, and other extreme weather events have become increasingly common. Everyone's habitation and even their survival are now threatened by the reality of climate change.

Responding to this threat requires two connected initiatives that would be accelerated by democratizing habitation. The first is to speed up the shift to energy conservation and the use of renewables so that societies could more quickly lower the production of greenhouse gases. Whatever initiatives have been put into place by central governments are bound to move more quickly if and when people at the local level are actively engaged in reducing their community's dependence on fossil fuels. At the same time, those local initiatives would place more pressure on central governments to move more boldly and spend more money on the effort.

The second initiative is increasing the resilience of local communities, so that people are better protected against extreme heat, flooding or other climate-related disasters. This can involve everything from major infrastructure projects to redirect water flows to the creation of cooling centers to organizing self-help initiatives at the neighborhood level.