See project website – blueurban.org
Multi-sited fieldwork spaces: Jakarta, Semarang, Banjarmasin, Tokyo, Singapore, and Rotterdam (Nov 2020 – September 2023)
Donor – DFG SPP 1889 Regional Sea Level and Society (2016-2020)
PIs – Dr. Rapti Siriwardane & Dr. Johannes Herbeck with partner institutions Universitas Indonesia (Dr. Athor Subroto),
University of Singapore (Prof. Kelvin Low & Dr. Noorman Abdullah), & Ateneo de Manila University
(Prof. Emma Porio)
Unlike figures of modernist ´development´ such as dams and fortressed conservation zones, coastal protection has historically been a relatively non-controversial political object. This is rapidly changing with the creation of new kinds of risk-driven territory-making, the creation of seawalls, border and buffer zones.
In Phase I of the EMERSA project, we studied knowledge mobilities, while asking which solutions for sea level change adaptation gained local traction and why. This second phase project focuses on urban infrastructural futures, in order to understand broader entanglements between risk-driven practices of coastal intervention and more profit-led processes of urban change, taking into account real estate development for example. Sea level change can therefore be recast as a lived reality that is both dystopic for some, and utopic for others.
BlueUrban explores how global networks of experimentation and innovation for living with sea level change influence diverse ways in which Southeast Asia’s coastal cities futuristically reimagine, negotiate, and materially shape their urban environments in the century to come.
At its core, BlueUrban mapped patterns of global circulation, and to trace how urban imaginaries and practices of speculative futuring for living with socio-environmental uncertainty evolve in Jakarta, Manila, and Singapore. We focused on two emergent technologies of coastal adaptation: multifunctional dikes and large buoyant structures including artificial islands. The broader entanglements between the Netherlands, Japan and Singapore in the context of floating city-making and futuristic superdikes are brought into perspective.
In particular, BlueUrban investigated how micro-practices of ‘mobility agents’ in the ‘traveling business’ of sea level change adaptation co-shape ways in which cities come to be speculatively futured, for whom and why. The study conceptualises adaptation as a discursive practice, and a highly charged economic and political sphere, that connects vastly different sites for coastal change through a global set-up of knowledge transfer and translation, yielding both winners and losers in its wake.
