Tidescapes Collaborative
The Tidescapes Collaborative is a non-profit initiative that supports littoral communities envision alternatives to flood-induced displacement.
It is a space for reimagining equitable multispecies futures through vision building and local experiments at placemaking.
WHO
For changemakers, researchers, artists, designers, educators, planners and practitioners from majority-world regions that ask - what other worlds are possible? For those committed to the imperative of decolonizing and pluralizing ideas around what "adaptation" means across oceanic and littoral sites.
WHAT
In a rapidly warming and overbuilt world, underscored by profound transformations across oceans, aquifers, deltas, and riverways, Tidescapes offers an inclusive, safe space for exploring situated experiments and grounded innovations. These include emerging low-impact, affordable socio-technological experiments and vernacular practices that are deeply rooted and inspired by heritage and situated knowledge forms.
HOW
By learning across Africa, Asia, and the Americas, combining arts-centred play-based exploration and other collaborative endeavors that recentre diverse stories on multispecies cohabitation and thriving in waterlogged environments.
WHY
To foster immersive storytelling, practical design strategies, and freely accessible learning methodologies that knit transoceanic and littoral community networks centred around intersectional justice and socio-ecological regeneration.
Our Story
The Tidescapes Collaboratory emerged from years of ethnographic research conducted across the Indo-Malay-Philippines archipelago, generously supported by the German Science Association (DFG) in partnership with regional institutions, including Ateneo de Manila University, the National University of Singapore, and Universitas Indonesia (2016–2023).
Our community-centered work focused on the lived realities of loss, displacement, and dispossession brought about by interventionist anti-flood measures such as “managed retreat” and the construction of deltaic infrastructures. While documenting stories of relocation and forced eviction, we also recognized that sea- and landscapes are never truly abandoned. These spaces often retain traces of past lives and remain connected to the people who inhabited them. Marked by ancestral graves, former farmlands, fish ponds, and remnants of built infrastructure, these places continue to be revisited, terraformed, and cherished, reflecting enduring kinship and place attachments.
The disconnections and immobilities wrought by the pandemic underscored the need to create and maintain spaces of safety—spaces in which critical methods and pedagogies could help individuals rehearse, share, and reclaim their own stories (see, for example, “A Collaboratory on Indian Ocean Ethnographies“).
This also raises the question: What about the promises of everyday speculative design thinking, beyond the reach of external, commodified sociotechnical solutions? Within these worlds, we observe immense ingenuity and the potential for locally attuned strategies—approaches that are accessible, affordable, and practical, grounded in the situated nuances of places and the experimental processes they foster.