BLUE URBAN
INFRACTRUCTURAL CARTOGRAPHIES IN AN AGE OF CLIMATE SOLUTIONISM
From the project “BlueUrban – Global Trajectories and Specultative Futures in Sea-level Change Adaptation in Southeast Asia”, funded by the German Science Foundation´s SPP 1889 Regional Sealevel Change and Society.
Text written by Damian Borovsky & Rapti Siriwardane-de Zoysa
A
number of intersecting binaries haunt modernist terra-centric urban
planning and oceanic placemaking across littoral Southeast Asia: the embracing of dry, protective or more
“wet” approaches to coastal adaptation; retreat or reclamation;
risk-centered planning or profit-led speculation. While tracing “the
slow work of assembling global knowledge infrastructures” (Mahony
et al. 2018: 1), their
circulations and ruptures, reverberations and desertions, this counter-mapping focuses on infrastructural
time, by exploring
globalist solutions that shape visions of archipelagic planning and
constructions of aspirational aquatectural futures as a way
“climate-proofing” urban civilization. It is a canvas that
presents tensions that presage neoliberal real estate speculations
while at the same time, littoral spaces deemed as decaying, ruined,
and marginal are being abandoned amid diverse ecologies of
submergence – be it coastal abrasion, land subsidence,
liquefaction, groundwater salinization, or rain-fed urban flooding.
Through the storied words of sand and silt, bamboo and Styrofoam, we
explore peculiar, antithetical nature-cultures of coastal
fabrications. Some entail veritable waterscapes that are being
refashioned as terra
firma through
extensive land reclamation projects that are historically embedded
and still depend on extractivist economies of sand and other mined
sediments. Others foretell of futuristic imaginaries and sites of
floatation that embrace vastly novel ways of being and becoming
urban.
“Mapping” Sea Change Cosmologies
Rising sea levels fundamentally challenge what it means to be land-based on a global level; and the inability to conceptualize the multivalent effects of sea-level change—global land subsidence, destruction of countless ecosystems, mass human migration, as well as the realities of the coastal real-estate market, seaside development, the promise of floating urbanity, etc.—is of critical concern.
‘Mapping’ these rapid changes alongside the various cosmologies and terraqueous historicities of (the most critically affected) communities, and through the ley lines of global Capital and Geopolitics, turns the question of indexing these changes around to that of mapping itself. Fredric Jameson, developing the aesthetic of Cognitive Mapping in the 1980s, noted that “…the incapacity to map socially is as crippling to political experience as the analogous incapacity to map spatially is for urban experience. It follows that an aesthetic of cognitive mapping in this sense is an integral part of any socialist political project” (pp. 355).
It is in this vein that discursive scholars have reappropriated the Modern, Western and Colonial tool of cartography as a critical counteroffensive to the imperial history of indexing the world in movement. From a critical infrastructuree perspective, sea level change poses a multitude of challenges that extend beyond the physical implications. It disrupts the very foundations of our urban landscapes, challenging established notions of land-based living and infrastructure development. The consequences of sea level rise are far-reaching, affecting coastal communities, ecosystems, and economies worldwide.
Sea level change, temporalities & fixtures
Sea level change is not merely an environmental issue but a deeply interconnected social, economic, and political concern. It exposes the vulnerabilities and inequalities embedded within our existing infrastructure systems, highlighting not only the need for a comprehensive and inclusive approach to adaptation and resilience, but also acknowledgment of the intersectional inequities and marginalities that conventional, interventionist modes of ´adaptation´, often in the form of capital-intensive infrastructural projects may cause. By examining sea level change and the infrastructural futurities (they both usher and upend) through a critical lens, we can explore the power dynamics, economic interests, and social implications that shape globalist and translocal responses to this global challenge. We are left questioning the existing paradigms of coastal development, real estate markets, and urban planning, which often prioritize short-term gains over long-term sustainability. Moreover, we recognize the importance of engaging with diverse perspectives and knowledge systems. Indigenous communities possess invaluable traditional knowledge and practices that can inform our understanding of blue urbanity even as the rising sea puts these practices under further duress.
The
Micronesian Stick Chart
The Micronesian stick chart may serve as a lesson and allegory for the cartographic desires and epistemic practice overlooked by Western mapping techniques and ultimately buried by industrialization. Bound webs of coconut fibers, shells, pebbles, and bamboo, stick charts were used by islanders to navigate ocean swells and wind currents between islands. The only known premodern mapping of ocean swells to exist, they were radically subjective (often a single person would be able to delineate a stick chart) and memorized rather than brought along. As the “guiding principle” for the Tidalectics (2018) project, stick charts animate a practice of collective oceanic meaning-making where readers can “[position] themselves within the space they are traveling through, not above or outside it as in the meta-perspective indicated by scaled two-dimensional maps” (Tidalectics p. 34).
BlueUrban seeks to continue this living, ‘messy’ and embodied practice in order to trace the contours of global lived experience along, against, and across the rising seas.
The Micronesian stick chart may serve as a lesson and allegory for the cartographic desires and epistemic practice overlooked by Western mapping techniques and ultimately buried by industrialization. Bound webs of coconut fibers, shells, pebbles, and bamboo, stick charts were used by islanders to navigate ocean swells and wind currents between islands. The only known premodern mapping of ocean swells to exist, they were radically subjective (often a single person would be able to delineate a stick chart) and memorized rather than brought along. As the “guiding principle” for the Tidalectics (2018) project, stick charts animate a practice of collective oceanic meaning-making where readers can “[position] themselves within the space they are traveling through, not above or outside it as in the meta-perspective indicated by scaled two-dimensional maps” (Tidalectics p. 34).
BlueUrban seeks to continue this living, ‘messy’ and embodied practice in order to trace the contours of global lived experience along, against, and across the rising seas.
References:
Hessler, S. ed. (2018). Tidalectics : imagining an oceanic worldview through art and science. London, England: TBA21-Academy
Jameson, Fredric (1998). “Cognitive Mapping.” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, pp. 355, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19059-1).
Mahony, Martin, and Mike Hulme. (2018) "Epistemic geographies of climate change: Science, space and politics." Progress in Human Geography 42, no. 3 (2018): 395-424.