BLUE URBAN
MATERIALITIES
Text written by Damian Borovsky & Rapti Siriwardane-de Zoysa
Coastal Over/Development
Keller Easterling’s bizarre essay in Tidalectics, “Sea-Level Rise and Suburbia in Reverse”, imagines a new mortgage scheme incentivizing de-sprawl away from current and future coastal flood areas, essentially leveraging the real estate market into coastal revetments. Possible problem: relying on the market to handle infrastructural and residential planning against sea-level change ignores the ultimate financial loss that is required for handling climate change; and these schemes inevitably target an upper middle-class homeownership that is a minority of those globally affected by sea level change in the first place.
Coastlines are not only contemporary riskscapes, re-chiselled through circular narratives of ecological disaster, vulnerability, social uncertainty and precarity. They are also being increasingly although less visibly refashioned as interventionist spaces for engineering experimentation (taking for example newer island reclamation and dredging projects), and as new profit frontiers in which hybrid sciences and political acumen come together in adapting to sea level change through purely technical means. The avid fervour with which coastal land acquisition and privatization projects are being rolled out across diverse neoliberal cities, from Lagos to Suva, Bonaire to Jakarta present contradictory world-making visions of waterfront living. If the post-war “coast rush” has been unfolding over the course of several decades, do the philosophies and enactments of architectural utopias and political projects such as Amphi-bios constructions and sea-steading advance particular sensibilities of idealized coastal life, and of littoral space depicting the ways in which they ought to be appropriated, legitimately used and consumed?
“Old shipyards amid land speculation”
Navotas City, Metro Manila 2017
“A recently evicted informal settlement, Navotas”
© Henryk Alff, BBS, Metro Manila 2018
Living with dykes
Considering the visibility of infrastructural projects as a means of coastal protection against urban sea level change, dyking can be taken as both a form of ‘defense’ and as a means of ‘dwelling’ or living with/from water. Dyking itself is an institutionalised historic practice as witnessed in expansive coastscapes across the Netherlands and Germany for example, a societal infrastructural network of societal relations entailing historic roles such as dyke masters and maintenance societies. Yet, dykes are not merely sea walls. While they foreground sensibilities of impermeability – of both water and sediment, the also perform the generative work of differentiating, demarcating, and performing diverse kinds of urban placemaking and becoming. Notwithstanding, polder dyking became a solutionist strategy often endorsed by large international donors and consultancies in submerging coastal cities such as Jakarta and the Philippines. Yet, in the case of this polder dyke spanning Navotas City (Manila), the materialization of the dyke can also be read as a ‘living’ infrastructure, placing it against a broader canvas of urban transformations encompassing contestations around disaster risk reduction, land use, uneven livelihood access, tenurial security among informal settlers, and the neoliberal aesthetics of urban spectacle.
As a means of transcending the defense/dwelling binary, dyking also exists as a mode of everyday urban governance. Not only does it exist as a line of defense for protective living, but also as urban spectacle. Dyking also symbolizes a buffer zone or marker for developer- and state-led land acquisition, dovetailing often violent forms of anti-poor eviction. Yet, more ambiguously, sea walls also remake fluid borderlands in their own right, which at times rupture the very material fixities and aqua-terrestrial distinctions upon which hard engineering infrastructural solutions are often premised.
Arguably, these structures depict very little of the amphibious scaffolding of the informal settlements that dot the densely built coastal spaces of Navotas, that also houses its urban fisheries port. Perhaps one cannot help but to think back on the old days of hydroelectric dam-talk, replete with its discourses on taming and reigning in the white waters of those expansive transboundary rivers, making “nature” do its work. If the 70s and 80s were flecked with the modernist rationalities of dam building, perhaps the next few decades will be shaped by the contours of giant seawalls and other coastal defence fortifications?
Against the contested backdrop of ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ boundary-protection methods, the terrestrial or the amphibiously-inspired, what mental models do the futures of contemporary coastlines stand to offer, particularly in spaces across Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas? At other times, these visionary desires often entail composite contradictory imaginaries and technics representing manifold ways in which communities, particularly those comprising densely populated urban societies will be living with/out water in the decades – if not centuries – to come. What arguably appears to sit in stark contrast to one another are the polarized narratives between living amphibiously with the watery incursions (and promissory futures) that relative sea level change, compounded by land subsidence, seem to present.
It was in May 2017 that I became stealthy seawall walker, when I finally mastered the fear of losing my footing, clamoured atop some loose concrete to gingerly tread the length of about half a mile above northern Manila´s cinereous-grey breakwaters. Its coastal waters yawn out to the South China Sea, taking your breath away. Drawing you into its metallic fold, what greets the eye is an almost dystopian Boschian image entailing cranes, cutterheads, booster pumps, sand spreaders, and hydraulic fills of military precision – some that crank through the night.
What meanings and sensibilities about do coastal protection agencies carry, particularly against the backdrop of Navotas´ diverse social collectives – from its harbour societies to its ship building industries and its informal fisher settlements? The very term coastal defence bears a narrow set of visions and susceptibilities of/for living with or without water. “It’s a war against the sea” – the surging tides – suggest groups of local and foreign engineers who lend their mercenary expertise. The temporary makeshift concrete and wooden structures which they cohabit are referred to as “barracks” at times stilted and often built with the assistance of resident fishing communities.
Excerpt from field journal, Metro Manila, May 2017 (R. Siriwardane)
When nothing else noted photographies by R. Siriwardane
“Boundary-makers
between land and sea”
© Henryk Alff, Navotas City, Metro Manila 2018
© Henryk Alff, Navotas City, Metro Manila 2018
“Dyke
walking upon the rubble of eviction” San
Jose, Metro Manila 2017
“Walling
the Coast” Navotas City, Metro Manila 2017
“Infrastructural
ruination in inventionist worlds of flood protection”
Navotas City, Metro Manila 2017
Navotas City, Metro Manila 2017
Navotas City, Metro Manila 2017
End of the hourglass - legacies of sand
Sand is the most used natural resource on Earth after water. Our dependence on the material has led some to call it “the most important solid substance on Earth” and “the literal foundation of modern civilization” (Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain, 2018). And much like the ocean, sand has long existed in the cultural imaginary as a metaphor for the infinite. Archimides’ treatise The Sand Reckoner (3rd century BC) purports to calculate the number of grains of sand that could fit in the universe. Such a calculation, however, requires two preliminary epistemic requirements: knowledge of the universes’ size, and the ability to talk about extremely large numbers. (The piece is notorious in the advancement of the latter through the law of exponents and the invention of other mathematical terms such as the myriad (μυριάς)—10,000 literally or, in contemporary English colloquialism, any indefinitely large number.) Indeed, an allegorical reading of this work fatally stages Archimides’ meta-goal as the implementation of numbers ‘large enough to exceed the multitude of the seemingly infinite’ (sand), as he narrates in the beginning of his work. The ‘real’ number of grains in the universe, though actually given by Archimides, is indeed the literary architecture for calculating the incalculable; and so sand remains the allegory for that which remains beyond the calculable. In fact, the demand for construction grade sand—primarily sourced from rivers and some coastal environments—is so high that the seemingly infinite resource is projected to run out in the coming decades.
The material qualifications for construction grade sand, used to make concrete and bricks, writes the sand found in our vast (and growing) deserts out of the equation, and must therefore come from water-eroded particles found in what are now some of the most critically endangered environments in the world. Essentially, the world is running out of useful sand at a moment when sea-level change threatens almost every coastline globally, with sand being one of the few affordable tools for developing countries to bolster their shores with.
Sand’s peculiar material and political-economic status means that mapping its global extraction is difficult to calculate, and a large roadblock to managing and regulating the sand economy is the lack of data regarding its extraction, transportation, and use in other industries. Currently, no global databases exist for mining or consumption, and these problems compound when it comes to global efforts to mitigate harm and instigate policy for the often-unregulated practice. The industry is well-known for environmental destruction of river and estuarine environments, as well as violence in the form of ‘sand mafias’ and forced labor. Furthermore, unlike many bulk goods, sand is almost entirely used domestically by the countries who extract it, with few exceptions (i.e. Singapore). Likely due to the low value for weight of the cargo, the domestic data is difficult to quantify.
Sand’s peculiar material and political-economic status means that mapping its global extraction is difficult to calculate, and a large roadblock to managing and regulating the sand economy is the lack of data regarding its extraction, transportation, and use in other industries. Currently, no global databases exist for mining or consumption, and these problems compound when it comes to global efforts to mitigate harm and instigate policy for the often-unregulated practice. The industry is well-known for environmental destruction of river and estuarine environments, as well as violence in the form of ‘sand mafias’ and forced labor. Furthermore, unlike many bulk goods, sand is almost entirely used domestically by the countries who extract it, with few exceptions (i.e. Singapore). Likely due to the low value for weight of the cargo, the domestic data is difficult to quantify.
Sand mining by PT Anurah Mitra Graha (AMG).
Image by Fathul Rakhman/Mongabay Indonesia.
As sea levels rise and continue to swallow up terraqueous environments lacking the means to defend themselves, sea-level rise coupled with the sand economy plays out a particular politics. It is not simply the case that some land is sacrificed so other land, even in other countries, may survive or expand: the sand economy involves the buying and selling of livable and governable space at an historic moment when this space is itself everywhere threatened.
Singapore, an outlier in sand consumption, has increased its own territory by 130 sq km in the past 40 years with sand almost entirely imported from neighboring countries. It’s own reserves depleted since the 1980s, the major supplier had been Indonesia—but due to environmental degredation, the country imposed a ban on sand exports for twenty years which only recently was lifted. Entire islands in Indonesia have disappeared for a Singaporean coastline shored up with casinos, condominiums, and infinity pools falling forever into a faraway sea actively swallowing the coastal origins: a stark allegory for winners and losers in the geopolitical-financial lottery of coastal development.
Sand, the sea, and money flowing from slot machines are three interconnected images of opacity clouding the image of coastal development politics with granular noise. The difficulty with figuring sand—its flowing homogeneity, unruly materiality, and commercial untraceability—make it materially analogous to the economic forces transforming the seascapes with and against our changing seascapes.
Singapore, an outlier in sand consumption, has increased its own territory by 130 sq km in the past 40 years with sand almost entirely imported from neighboring countries. It’s own reserves depleted since the 1980s, the major supplier had been Indonesia—but due to environmental degredation, the country imposed a ban on sand exports for twenty years which only recently was lifted. Entire islands in Indonesia have disappeared for a Singaporean coastline shored up with casinos, condominiums, and infinity pools falling forever into a faraway sea actively swallowing the coastal origins: a stark allegory for winners and losers in the geopolitical-financial lottery of coastal development.
Sand, the sea, and money flowing from slot machines are three interconnected images of opacity clouding the image of coastal development politics with granular noise. The difficulty with figuring sand—its flowing homogeneity, unruly materiality, and commercial untraceability—make it materially analogous to the economic forces transforming the seascapes with and against our changing seascapes.
Amidst growing and sinking coastlines, new islands rise up: Christopher Colombus, Vasco de Gama, Voltaire, James Cook—these temporary islands, geo-literary artifacts of sand’s contemporary colonial entanglements, are dredged for sand storage and shipping by corporations like the Belgian Jan De Nul (Jan ‘Nothing’). One of their ships, Alexander von Humboldt, is ironically named after a German Romantic scientist considered the father of ecology and environmentalism, the first to postulate scientific theories of human-induced climate change.
As Foucault warned at the conclusion of The Order of Things:
Amidst growing and sinking coastlines, new islands rise up: Christopher Colombus, Vasco de Gama, Voltaire, James Cook—these temporary islands, geo-literary artifacts of sand’s contemporary colonial entanglements, are dredged for sand storage and shipping by corporations like the Belgian Jan De Nul (Jan ‘Nothing’). One of their ships, Alexander von Humboldt, is ironically named after a German Romantic scientist considered the father of ecology and environmentalism, the first to postulate scientific theories of human-induced climate change.
As Foucault warned at the conclusion of The Order of Things:
…if some event [climate change] of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility – without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises – were to cause them [the conceptual grounding of ourselves] to crumble, as the ground of Classical thought did, at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.
Reclamational contours – Artificial islands and the terrestrialisation of the sea
Coastal and riparian reclamation have had long cultural histories as adaptive practices, both in the context of coastal protection and in creating new ground. Tellingly, a great number of the world´s contemporary and postcolonial coastal cities bear witness to considerable legacies of seacoast reclamation and resource extraction. As fixed grounded spaces are terraformed while their coastal edges and fringes are extended out to sea, futuristic visions of urbanized oceans were seeded as early as the 1960s.Yet, reclamation as practice in the forging of high-value real estate in the production of the neoliberal market-led city has been a relatively recent development. In the 1990s, iconic projects in the Arabian Gulf such as the Palm Islands were trumped as brave new geoengineering feats in the refashioning of new offshore and island territorialities. Decades later, reclamation and the making of artificial islands under UNCLOS definitions gained renewed purchase for claiming sovereignty, and more so as a political means of extending oceanic areas beyond national jurisdiction, taking for example China´s contestations in the South China Sea.
Following devastating urban floods in Jakarta in 2013, an ambitious and controversial megaproject was proposed that brought together coastal protective and urban development functions under the unified ambit of the National Capital Integrated and Coastal Development (NCICD) plan. The initiative follows in the wake of the older Jakarta Coastal Defense Strategy Project (JCDS), steered by a consortium of state-based, local and international consultants that were primarily Dutch, Korean and Japanese. Formerly trumped as the Great Garuda, the concerted project was initially envisioned to entail a giant sea wall to protect northern Jakarta from coastal flooding, while connecting West Java and Banten. What rendered it politically contentious was its seaward expansion of 17 artificial islands in the name of creating more livable urban space. Subsequently, as a result of widespread public litigation, the megaproject was rebranded as the NCICD and only four partially built islets were surreptitiously granted approval to continue. Today, Golf Island or Pantai Indah Kapuk (PIK II) in Jakarta Utara appears as a solitary artificial island boasting some of the most expensive real estate in metropolitan Jakarta.
“Singapore´s incessant reclamational thrust”
© Jalaludin bin Salleh, drone image, Singapore 2018
“A polarized shoreline with a view of reclaimed spaces, as seen from a Kamal Mura jetty”
© Rapti Siriwardane, Jakarta 2022
“Residues that remain, amid wall art in a barangay near San Jose
in which informal settlers were forcibly relocated.”
© Rapti Siriwardane, Metro Manila 2017
Buoyant life - The´wisdom´ of bamboo
Buoyancy is usually applied to subjects that float or rise to the surface; or as an elemental material liquid or gas, that keeps a body afloat or causes it to rise. As materiality and metaphor, buoyancy indicates lightness, and, figuratively, a sense of liveliness and freedom of/in being. Yet, buoyancy does not embody the sensibilities of free, open drift – a metaphor increasingly used across the blue humanities when conceptualising the agentive quality of recalcitrant matters of waste such as toxic spills, marine plastic and other kinds of flotsam and jetsam. Drawing from old French boieor Middle Dutch boeyemeaning to chain or fetter something to a spot, buoyancy as a term signifies objects and life forms that are nestled in place. Meanwhile, urban spaces are themselves never quite spatially bound. Urbanity – as a fickle concept comprises mobile assemblages of infrastructures, social relations, practices, objects, capital and its more-than-human life. The rhythms and circulations that characterise the contemporary city as a space of transit renders it amenable to multiple forms of material and metaphoric flotations – from ideologies and capital to itinerant traders, and migrant bodies to whimsical flâneurs, kinetic elites and more.
The industrialisation and urbanisation of the world´s oceans have unfolded since colonial encounters in the latter part of the eighteenth-century, spilling into postwar decades. Off-shore resource extraction in the case of oil, gas, and mineral mining heralded early forms of floating construction. While in the 1960s, futuristic blueprints of utopian projects like Kiyonori Kikutake´s vision of Unabaraor the Sea City imagined floating cities as “interconnected weblike arcs colonising the ocean´s placid grey surface” (Adams 2015; 127). If the modernist figure of the floating city stands to be taken as a speculative, promissory leitmotif for contending with multiple climate crises, the “buoyant turn” in aquatectural design, architecture and engineering tellingly offers no singular visions of/at floating urbanity.
A recurring onto-epistemological question arising from ethnographic field encounters across the Indo-Malay Archipelago was on how to conceptually locate epistemic dependencies around the global ´business´ of adaptation in subsidence-challenged and perpetually waterlogged urbanities particularly in coastal Java. These spaces bear their own material spacetimes of reversals – first, when water was made into land (through modernist project of Dutch colonial citymaking), and in the contemporary, during long-drawn trajectories shoreline abrasion in which land becomes water (again). While fluctuant intertidal zones have typically constituted vast socio-temporal milieus of material and metaphoric intermixing and hybridity, spaces of perpetual submergence are inevitably rendered meanings of techno-dialogic emptiness. Narratively, they constitute not only wastelands but are figuratively imagined by planners astabula rasa(of a nascent future), as opposed to that of a settler past (once frontierland). Both bear ostensible and less visible dis/continuities of “discredited knowers” (see Nyquist Potter 2018) and their ethico-epistemic processes at placemaking and territorialisation.
Bamboo as both a living tree and as timber assumes manifold allegories – as a sentient way of being flexible yet strong in Taoist and other Eastern-based spiritual philosophies; as a highly fetishised material in the spaces of exotic Orientalised consumption in across the world, in resorts, spa settings and the like. Engineering, architectural and other design-based academics and knowledge producers have recently been turning towards learning from what they see as a historic culture of “bamboo-based learning.” Architectural professor Dr. Popi Puspitasarifrom Jakarta´s Trisakti University works at ´retrofitting´ vernacular architectural forms found in the floating riverine structures oflantingabodes from sites such as South Kalimantan´s Banjarmasin. This translational work – from riparian lifeworlds of amphibious architecture to the more erratic tidal fluxes of Javanese coastal waters to her seems like a leap of faith, yet this is where innovative imaginaries of new materials are forged, in her review. Lanting houses themselves are few and far between in cities such as Banjarmasin which, while celebrating their riverine urban heritage, have been systemically making it harder for vernacular structures to co-exist with more landed housing.
Yet, bamboo as a materiality appears both viscous and elusive across Javanese colonial and post-independent histories. During Dutch Batavia, bamboo was perceived as a relatively more primitive building material that was fire-prone and susceptible to earthquake-based damage. Almost a century later, during the Suharto dictatorship, the depletion of wild and cultivated bamboo led to prohibitions against unregulated harvesting. Local companies such as Jakarta-based Viro World emerged through the creation of artificial rattan, palm fronds and other tropical archipelagic objects assembled from materials of discard such as rice husk and wood chip, while working with Javanese artisanal craftspeople. To come full circle, it was this very company that was commissioned by Disney World in Orlando, Florida to re-create several amphibious installations for its Avatar II dioramas.
“The
lanting house will float as the water got deeper. No matter how
severe the flooding is, the lanting will float. If we stay in a
lanting, it is hard to go to the land when it is flooded as the
footbridge usually gets submerged. It is hard for me to go to the
market. My husband is a klotok driver and I just stay at home. We´ve
been here since my husband's grandfather time but if the house
started to break down, we fixed it… we also put Styrofoam under the
house (from our old refrigerator packaging). There was a recent film
shooting of Jendela
Seribu Sungai(A Window to a Thousand Rivers). This fragile lanting house could not
accommodate a lot of people, all that film crew! It has been a long
time since we have put in new foundation material. As a little girl I
was never used to living in a rocking house. It feels worse when a
speed boat passes by. During my first two months, when I feel it
rocking, I will lie down on the floor or lean against the wall. I am
now used to it. If you’re not used to living in lanting, you'll get
dizzy…”
- Siti, lanting house
resident in Banjarmasin (interview in September 2023).
“High
value, gated coastal edges of an otherwise sinking northern Jakarta”
© Rapti Siriwardane, Ancol, northern Jakarta 2022
“People,
vessels, and data on the move in a rapidly
subsiding ferry terminal in which land and sea almost becomes one.”
© Johannes Herbeck, Ancol, northern Jakarta 2022
subsiding ferry terminal in which land and sea almost becomes one.”
© Johannes Herbeck, Ancol, northern Jakarta 2022
“Tambak
Lorok during daily high tide that turns its urban fabric into a
veritable waterworld.” © Johannes Herbeck, Semarang 2022
“A lanting house along the Martapura river in Banjarmasin” © Rapti
Siriwardane, South Kalimantan 2023
“Dr
Popi displaying an architectural model of a riverine lantinghouse typically found in Kalimantan” © Johannes Herbeck, Semarang
2022
Artificial bamboo in
ViroWorld´s showroom © Rapti Siriwardane, Jakarta 2023
Styrofoam as ´new´ aquatectural materiality
In 2016, Indonesia´s first floating library was completed in Tambak Lorok with a grand opening ceremony. A year prior, President Jokowi had inaugurated Tambak Lorok as Kampong Bahari. Jokowi’s designation came with a flood of efforts to reshape the public imagination of Tambak Lorok, as a site of urban deprivation. When PUPR agents were tasked with “revitalising” the kampong, community leaders suggested a floating children's library that served as a multifunctional public space in the rebranded settlement. Fitted with solar panels and bio-composting toilets, its foundation was made of fabricated recycled Styrofoam developed by B-Foam, a Bandung-based company, as an alternative to the historic use of bamboo as a floating materiality1. To its makers and designers, Styrofoam - recycled out of found objects and waste collected from waterways - symbolised not only a sustainable construction material, but one promising a new material culture at earthquake-proof and buoyant building.
Ironically,
the key inspiration behind Semarang
́s
buoyant experiment
was Ijsberg, Amsterdam´s newest quarter, bearing little trace of its
historic boathouse communities. Having visited Ijsberg, Mulyanto
envisioned replicating a
particular interpretation of
“Dutch-styled
urban
amphibious living”
in a bid to
explore
alternatives to
capital-intensive coastal
armouring. Alongside like-minded engineers at the Research &
Development Agency (R&D) of PUPR it was anticipated that floating
infrastructure would
reconnect
Java
with
its “archipelagic” amphibious past of building and dwelling
between land and water:
“Is Indonesia a maritime or continental country? Now, how many maritime technologies are being used for housing development in Indonesia? For a maritime country, why there are few marine technological innovations used in solving housing problems? This was the question asked by Dr. Ari Setiadi. a grounded question.”– Interview with PUPR Engineer, February 2023).
“Originally, the floating home was intended to be a tourist attraction. Second, the floating house project began as a pilot house because land subsidence has historically happened in coastal areas. This floating house is meant for residents who cannot afford to elevate their homes above sea level. Sea water enters residents' homes as a result of rising sea levels and land subsidence. The calculation is that land subsidence will occur every 5 years, making the danger of flooding even more real. This is a threat to the poor who do not have the funds to elevate their building land, and if water continues to enter residents' housing, then their housing will also become slums….It is a problem of real-estate—even if people could afford floating houses, the actual ownership of the water is difficult to work around… Questions of ownership and responsibility have led to the local government letting it fall into disrepair: maintenance is never as sensational as inauguration.”
– PUPR
official, Yogyakarta, February 2023
©
Johannes Herbeck, Semarang, 2022
©
Rapti Siriwardane, Ijsberg,
Amsterdam, November 2023
©
Rapti Siriwardane, Ijsberg,
Amsterdam, November 2023
Tambok
Lorok´s symbolic collapse of the steel foot-bridge in late 2022,
following a storm surge” © R. Siriwardane, Semarang, 2023
If
´artificial´ materials mimicking symbols of buoyancy such as bamboo
was one experimental response, another was the creation of entirely
´new´ materials – forged through practices of socio-technical
creolisation. The kinds of desirable composite materials that make
for sustainably-sourced buoyant building remains hotly contested
among aquatecture circles. Prefabricated materials (e.g., recycled
steel as popularised though container housing) are seen to quicken
construction as some may take as little as half the time otherwise
used in conventional terrestrial construction.
The manufacturing company B-FOAM that was commissioned to create the floating library´s buoyant platform utilises “found” materials, particularly single-use styrofoam salvaged from Bandung´s waterways through local networks of paid scavengers and collectors. Combining buoyant, earthquake-proof and fire-resistant material technologies from Italy and Japan in pioneering hybrid materials. Styrofoam conventionally has had a bad rap for being among the most pollutive solid waste substances that is at the same time also petroleum-derived. Yet, it is the very durability and pliant recyclability that manufacturers such as B-FOAM would argue lends it its futuristic edge as a buoyant materiality, further making for modular construction through sourced composites recycled and remade into structures that visual mimic the solidity of concrete. If one particular figure stood to represent material longevity in anthropocentric terms, this would be a stone-carved gravestone. B-FOAM´s production of privately commissioned cemetery objects from mausoleum roofs to headstones bears testimony to what its MIT-educated founder Don Kamarga refers to as “turning a vice material” into an artefact of speculative promise.
The manufacturing company B-FOAM that was commissioned to create the floating library´s buoyant platform utilises “found” materials, particularly single-use styrofoam salvaged from Bandung´s waterways through local networks of paid scavengers and collectors. Combining buoyant, earthquake-proof and fire-resistant material technologies from Italy and Japan in pioneering hybrid materials. Styrofoam conventionally has had a bad rap for being among the most pollutive solid waste substances that is at the same time also petroleum-derived. Yet, it is the very durability and pliant recyclability that manufacturers such as B-FOAM would argue lends it its futuristic edge as a buoyant materiality, further making for modular construction through sourced composites recycled and remade into structures that visual mimic the solidity of concrete. If one particular figure stood to represent material longevity in anthropocentric terms, this would be a stone-carved gravestone. B-FOAM´s production of privately commissioned cemetery objects from mausoleum roofs to headstones bears testimony to what its MIT-educated founder Don Kamarga refers to as “turning a vice material” into an artefact of speculative promise.
If the modernist figure of the floating city stands to be taken as a speculative and promissory leitmotif for living with rising seas, the “buoyant turn” in aquatectural design, architecture and engineering offers no singular visions of/at floating urbanity. As a grand infrastructural solution, floating cities embody metaphoric visions of climate-proofing coastal futures through neoliberal visions of sustainability and concomitant ecologically modernist aspirations. These patchworked solutions woven into their material fabric are not unlike the very modular structural forms their design blueprints embrace. Symbolically, the more grander globalist visions like those fronted by Oceanix also portend novel ways of being urban. For some designers and planners, buoyancy is enlivened as a highly situated adaptive function in times of watery incursions. While for others, it promises alternatives that may possibly redress urban socio-spatial inequities from unaffordable housing and land scarcity to threats of urban eviction. Thus, floating cities themselves stand as ambivalent floating signifiers, and not in the least in heralding a new civilisational future – at least in rhetoric.
1Historically, bamboo has been enlisted in vernacular forms of buoyant construction, as in the case of riverine lanting structures. Bamboo materiality stands to represent diverse meanings - a building material regulated by the Dutch due to its perceived inferiority. During the Suharto dictatorship, the overharvesting of bamboo resulted in a moratorium.
“Recycled
syrofoam blocks made to look like concrete at the B-FOAM factory” ©
R. Siriwardane, Bandung 2023
“Artisans
carving Styrofoam cemetery objects mimicking concrete at the B-FOAM
factory” © R. Siriwardane, Bandung 2023
References:
Beiser, Vince (2018 “The World in a Grain: the story of sand and how it transformed civilization”, Riverhead Books, New York
Adams, Ross Exo. 2015. “Mare Magnum; Urbanization of Land and Sea.” In Peters,K., Steinberg, P., and Stratford, E. Territory Beyond Terra, London: Rowman &Littlefield, pp., 127—146
Nyquist Potter, Nancy (2018) "Moral experts, ethico-epistemic processes, and discredited knowers: An epistemology for bioethics."Moral Expertise: New Essays from Theoretical and Clinical Bioethics: 157-173.