BlueUrban - Global Trajectories and Speculative Futures
A great many of the world’s cities in recent history were built along seacoasts. Meanwhile, coastal waters continue to be rapidly urbanised.
This contemporary ‘coastal squeeze’ comes at a time of relative sea level change amidst planetary urbanization.
In archipelagic Southeast Asia, the armouring of urban shorelines through diverse grey and blue-green infrastructural solutions call for immense capital investment in the name of protected living against rising waters and coastal erosion, urban flooding, land subsidence, salinisation, and extreme weather events.
Yet, high value real estate development and coastal privatisation around the world reflect a vastly different antithetical reality, embracing divergent kinds of coastal futures.
BlueUrban explores this seeming paradox by analysing both risk-centred and opportunity-driven paradigms and solutions for sea level change adaptation in the coastal spaces of Jakarta, Metro Manila, and Singapore.
We do so by ‘following’ speculative infrastructuring experiments – both large-scale and community-driven – from the spaces in which they were first imagined, to their sites of regional circulation, and the project sites in which they materialize and are first piloted.
An a transcontinental project, we are a group of researchers and practitioners working at the intersection of urban geography, environmental anthropology, and humanistic urban planning. Our work is inspired by diverse currents within urban political ecology, decolonial praxis, geographies of affect and their more-than-human entanglements. Our methodological approaches draw on grounded theory and assemblage thinking, combining practices in transect walking, community mapping and visual ethnography.
Why Coastal Infrastructuring?
How might we envision coastal cities by 2050? Contemporary visions of living with sea level change and land subsidence are not always dystopic. At times urban futuristic imaginaries might also appear utopic for some, while climate change adaptation is increasingly being rendered a new profit frontier in the 21st century.
Meanwhile, regional and local planners and policymakers have been promoting new forms of “blue urbanism” and blue-green innovation (see Beatley, 2014; Assmuth et al., 2017), for not only living with environmental uncertainty, but in also reconnecting particular forms of urban life with oceanic spaces, also in ways that resonate with expert-led, managerialist planning agendas. Therefore, we turn to infrastructural futures as a means of understanding broader entanglements of placemaking, identity and belonging/exclusion, alongside changing urban aspirations and contending visions of citymaking.
Our Questions
We ask how global & local networks of innovation/experimentation for living with sea level change influence diverse ways in which coastal cities futuristically reimagine, challenge, and materially shape their urban environments in the century to come.
BlueUrban engages with two emerging sets of practices that are gaining increasing policy traction: multifunctional “superdikes” and technologies of floating (or “amphibious”) structures and artificial islands.
We follow these diverse protective and terra-aqueous solutions from their sites of innovation (e.g. planning labs, universities, architectural firms), though to their liminal spaces of circulation (i.e. trade fairs, conferences), and their very projects that implement and materialise these infrastructural visions, in their many forms.
On a more conceptual level, the project advances nascent research on the micro-politics and global epistemic mobilities of coastal “speculative futuring” for change adaptation.
Consortium Partners
Implementing institutions:
- Leibniz Center for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT), Bremen
- Sustainability Research Center (artec), University of Bremen
Principal Investigators
Dr. Rapti Siriwardane-de Zoysa
Senior Scientist (Social Anthropology)
Department of Social Sciences
Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research, Bremen
- rapti.siriwardane(at)leibniz-zmt.de
- Fahrenheitstrasse 6 (Office: Wienerstr. 7, Top Floor) 28359 Bremen, Germany
- +49 (0) 421 238 00 173
Dr. Johannes Herbeck
Senior Researcher (Human Geography)
artec Sustainability Research Center
Universität Bremen 33 04 40
28334 Bremen, Germany
- johannes.herbeck(at)uni-bremen.de
- Seminar - und Forschungsverfügungsgebäude (SFG), Enrique-Schmidt-Straße 7 28359 Bremen, Germany
- +49 (0) 421 218 61 833
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Acknowledgements: BlueUrban is funded as a second phase project under the DFG’s SPP 1889 Regional Sea Level Change and Society initiative.
Photo credits: Banner: Navotas in Metro Manila; Fig. 1: Coastal condos, northern Jakarta; Fig. 2: Dyke building, Navotas (R. Siriwardane 2017 ©)