In Jeddah today, climate does not only announce itself with floods or headlines; it patinas the ordinary. Street signs bleach faster, railings bloom with rust after a night that never cooled, and a shower through dust leaves a thin crust like dried tears on glass. If heatwaves are the body’s crisis, this is the city’s—a slow, public fraying.
Walk the Corniche at dusk and you can see the boundary layer at work: the neon script on a café sign bleeds rust into its own light; the marble cladding of a 2005 tower is already pocked like 19th-century sandstone. These are not random scars; they are chronographs of the air itself—each stain a dated entry in an atmospheric diary we have only just begun to read.
In that sense, Jeddah is writing an early draft of a text that many coastal cities will soon copy. The city’s weathered skin is not merely a maintenance problem; it is a palimpsest of the Anthropocene, where the physics of evaporation, the chemistry of salt, and the politics of upkeep intersect.
To study the corrosion of a railing is therefore also to study the corrosion of a promise: the promise that the built environment can outlast the climatic moment that produced it.
This reflection, after a long summer, is my way of opening the year. If climate writes on the city’s face, then we must ask: what do we wish to inscribe on the next twenty years? For me, the answer is to write Knowledge Economy 2045 — a long horizon where law, science, and ethics can together withstand the abrasions of our age.