Between "Blue Urbanism" and Tanah Air:

Urban Experiments, Circulations, and Placemaking as Sea Level Change Adaptation

11—13 September 2023, Jakarta, Indonesia
Universitas Indonesia (Salemba Campus & Hybrid)
Funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG-SPP 1889 Regional Sea Level Change & Society)

Why experiments at placemaking along the urban coast?

Coastal cities around the world are among the fastest growing urban spaces. While a greater proportion of the world´s megacities are situated along seacoasts, they remain doubly precarious to both the effects of slow-creep sea level change, and localised socio-environmental dynamics such as land subsidence and liquefaction that remain intrinsically political. 

Global coastal cities are also sites of markedly visible forms of social inequality and inequity, as urban shorelines continue to be overbuilt, privatised and gentrified, while continuously fragmenting spaces of unplanned urbanization and pushing the urban littoral poor further hinterland.

The connected diverse forms of coastal geo-engineering and placemaking weave together antithetical imaginaries of urban coastal futurities– some that embrace protective living away from water through the armouring of land-sea interfaces (through dykes and seawalls for example), while other rationalities embrace more amphibious forms of infrastructural production along seashores and over water.  

Taken together, these epistemologies and their relational entanglements bring to question new kinds of urbanism – one in which the city and sea are techno-scientifically and politically integrated, often within (and against) marked-led logics of late capitalism. These interventions often re-configure not only temporalities and spatio-technical fabrics of cities, but also reshape nature-cultures and manifold forms of cohabitation with more-than-human life.  

This transdisciplinary conference therefore sets out to explore these differentiated, polarising dynamics inherent in coastal cities, many of which have turned towards “blue urban solutionism” – whether in terms of deriving socio-economic value from the sea (e.g., via the Blue Economy), or more radically in terms of re-envisioning shored, urban life in highly protected terrestrial spaces or out at sea. Some of these approaches remain managerial and technocratic, while others may seek to challenge current exploitative and extractive models of socio-ecological transition in their wake.   

While cities turn to the sea, we also place as much emphasis on the un/rethinking of urbanizing/urbanized islands and urban centres in archipelagic contexts (or ´archipelagicities´). What sensibilities of amphibious and protective living with/away from water are foregrounded in these urban experiments? How do contemporary and evolving urban infrastructures, from the material and symbolic to the digital, reproduce and contest historic and new dynamics of urban coastal change?

In contemplating these antithetical realities, we draw inspiration from the Indonesian vernacular “Tanah Air” as but one historically embedded notion, a political concept and as metaphor with which to challenge, transgress and reimagine urban coastal futures.

This conference therefore also serves as an open invitation to explore and play with similar transcultural notions of cohabiting land and water at the same time, particularly across the vast heterogeneity of urban space and their practices at placemaking. 

Crosscutting currents may include but are not limited to:

–          Reimagining Island Cities / Archipelagicities (Southeast Asia & the Indian Ocean world, the Pacific and Oceania, the Mediterranean, the Caribbean Sea and beyond)

–          Unfixing the city / pluralising the urban amphibious

–          Understanding the power of hegemonic placemaking and engineering practices

–          Challenging paradigm shifts in technological and social praxis.

     Subsequent breakout sessions/ thematic parts include:
i       Unlearning – troubling past and contemporary meanings, sensibilities and practices in urban coastal spaces
ii.    Dreaming – exploring urban dreamscapes; envisioning transformative change and alternative futurities
iii.   Remaking – co-thinking challenges in coastal placemaking, the politics of sea level solutionism, forms of co-production and “planning from below”

        Expressions of interest to participate and conference abstracts (max 300 words) can be emailed to the conference co-ordinator Muthmainnah – blueurbanproject@outlook.co.id     Click here for registration link  

Abstract submission deadline  – July 18, 2023. Accepted submissions will be notified by the 20th of July.  No registration fees are required.

Organisers:
Dr. Rapti Siriwardane-de Zoysa (Leibniz-ZMT), Dr. Johannes Herbeck (University of Bremen), and Dr. Athor Subroto (Universitas Indonesia)