Project Details
Projekt
Towards Blue Urbanism for Sea Level Change Adaptation: Global Trajectories and Speculative Futuring in Island Southeast Asia (BlueUrban)
Applicants
Dr. Johannes Herbeck; Dr. Rapti Siriwardane, Ph.D.
Subject Area
Human Geography
Empirical Social Research
Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
Sociological Theory
Empirical Social Research
Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
Sociological Theory
Term
from 2019 to 2023
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 423737708
Sea level rise (SLR) is usually framed within contexts of risk and vulnerability, particularly across archipelagic Southeast Asia. The 'armoring' of urban shorelines and other infrastructural projects call for immense capital investment in the name of protected living against rising waters, land subsidence, and a host of other socio-ecological impacts. In parallel however, high value real estate and coastal privatization processes around the world reflect a different, antithetical reality in embracing vastly divergent kinds of coastal futures. The proposed project "Towards Blue Urbanism for Sea Level Change Adaptation" explores this seeming paradox by analyzing risk-centered and opportunity driven paradigms and solutions for sea level change adaptation and their trajectories and translations. In empirically grounding the study, we globally trace formations and discursive contestations around two emerging sets of practices that are gaining increasing policy traction: multifunctional "superdikes", as well as technologies of floating housing structures and artificial islands. By following these diverse protective and terra-aqueous solutions from sites of innovation and circulation, to projects that implement the practices in the three megacities of Singapore, Jakarta and Metro Manila we analyze the discursive spaces, the discourse carriers, and the epistemic channels by which change adaptation is rendered as a new profit frontier in the 21st century, promoting new forms of "blue urbanism". On a more abstract level, the project advances nascent research on the micro-politics and global epistemic mobilities of coastal “speculative futuring” for change adaptation.
DFG Programme
Priority Programmes
International Connection
Indonesia, Philippines, Singapore
Co-Investigators
Professor Dr. Michael Flitner; Professorin Dr. Anna-Katharina Hornidge
Cooperation Partners
Professor Dr. Kelvin E.Y. Low; Professorin Dr. Emma Porio; Dr. Hendricus Andy Simarmata
