As is well known, the architectural fulcrum of Fourier’s social system was the Phalanstery. Home to his associational community tethered together through the bond of “passionate attraction,” it was a people’s palace that assumed the form of—in Walter Benjamin’s characterization—a “city of arcades.”[3] Importantly, however, it was also a climatological mechanism that took its place within Fourier’s larger providentialist schema, which envisaged the transformation of the global climate through human cultivation.[4] This was, in other words, a vast—but divinely ordained—project of planetary air-conditioning. In his treatise The Theory of the Four Movements (1808), Fourier depicted the aurora borealis as a seminal effusion that could not enter into creative conjunction with its southern counterpart until humankind fulfilled the requisite preparations. These involved increasing the global population to two billion, and the subsequent cultivation of land as far as 65° north. This achievement, Fourier declared, would trigger the emergence of the Northern Crown, a fluidal ring, ignited through contact with the sun, which would pass light and heat to the earth and melt the northern ice. With new land thus released for cultivation, the destined human population of three billion could be fully realized within a newly equalized and temperate global climate.[5] (In a “Land of Cockaigne”–like touch, Fourier claimed that grapes would be grown in St. Petersburg, while the boreal fluid would infuse the sea with citric acid, giving it the pleasant flavor of lemonade).[6] All restrictions having been removed, the epoch of the Earth’s harmonic creations could then, at last, begin.