Abstract: Over the coming decades, as we navigate the end of the fossil fuel era, probably soon to be known as the carbonaceous period in human development (or more evocatively, after Yusoff [2010], the period of ‘the economy of dead animality’), we can predict with some certainty that cities will be the locus for action for whatever emerges to replace it. This is not just a recognition that more than half the worlds population now resides in cities and therefore that all actions in response to the threatening global conditions will reflect the interests of city-based citizens; it is much more. The very nature and form of cities - their physical and cultural dimensions - will amplify their place in the coming ‘post-carbon’ revolution - a revolution to transform the energy basis of the economy and to deliver resilience in the face of changed global conditions. This revolution will be as significant as any in human history and it will be first and foremost an urban revolution (even if it does also have the dimensions of an industrial, economic, ‘metabolic’, social and even ethical revolution). This paper reviews a program of engagement with urban communities in the city of Melbourne, known as EcoAcupuncture (EcoA), that has been developed over the last three years to respond to the challenges of that impending revolution. The critical question addressed by that program and considered in this paper is: How can we effectively initiate and support rapid structural and cultural change within existing urban environments and communities, to reconfigure urban form and life in anticipation of the projected impacts of climate change and peak oil? This is not a theoretical question; the policy challenges for governments in dealing with the rapid transition from a carbon based economy are significant. For local and city governments, where the connection with the concerns and fears of urban citizens can be most direct, where land-use planning decisions often intersect with projected climatic changes, and where vulnerability to energy pricing is already part of some community strategies, developing a coherent set of policies and programs for this transition has become a new priority. However, negotiating a process of transition in a democratic society quickly confronts what Beck [2010] identifies as the “urgent and somehow tabooed question” in the huge project of the “greening of society”: how to develop support from below, the “backing of everyday people of different classes, different nations, different political ideologies…support which in many cases would undermine…[current] lifestyles…consumption habits… social status and life conditions” [255]. EcoA recognises that a transition out of the carbonaceous era will require the reconfiguration of existing systems of provision1 that are both physically and culturally embedded in the structure of urban life, making ‘support from below’ more difficult to secure. The program proposes a way forward through the agency of design and engaged future visioning and, as the name implies, the translation of those visions into sets of targeted ‘niche’ interventions in the urban fabric to release energy for change.