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Abstract
The threat of flooding in cities is often compounded by political and economic decisions made on watershed management, land development and water infrastructure and provisioning. It has also become a point of conflict between cities’ objectives for development and modernization, and the struggles of marginalized residents living in low‐lying coastal and riverine areas to remain in place. Flooding takes on different forms depending on one's point of view. It is a biophysical issue, involving geology, geography, meteorology and ecology. It is one of urban governance, involving planning and maintenance of infrastructure and land use. And it is sociopolitical, involving historical social and spatial marginalization and contestation. This article, based on mixed‐methods research in Jakarta, Indonesia, traces the conceptual and physical contours of urban waterscapes across these conflicting ideas and narratives. It brings into dialogue theories of urban political ecology, landscape ecology and environmental ethnography to explore the interrelationships between biophysical and sociopolitical factors behind urban flooding. In the article the focus is on the varying materialities and scales involved, including the ecological scales of the watershed, the infrastructural scales associated with flood protection, and the urban scales of planning, governance and social activism. The article concludes with a proposition for a multidimensional approach to thinking and acting on problems of urban ecological change.
... Semakin intensif manusia menggunakan sumber daya alam maka semakin berkurang carrying capacity dari lingkungan hidup manusia (Meadows, Randers, & Meadows, 2005;Miller & Spoolman, 2016). Dewasa ini manusia hidup pada wilayah urban yang pengaruhnya tidak hanya pada perkotaan saja, melainkan wilayah di sekitarnya juga terpengaruh oleh sistem kehidupan urban, dan kebutuhan pemenuhan masyarakat urban (Goh, 2019;Parris, 2016). Hal tersebut kemudian berdampak pada rusaknya beragam ekosistem. ...
... Keberadaan air merupakan hal yang tidak terpisahkan dari eksistensi kehidupan manusia, oleh karena itu sangat penting menjaga sumber daya air bagi keberlanjutan manusia dan alam (WCED, 1987), terlebih dengan bertambahnya isu kerusakan lingkungan, pemanasan global, dan perubahan iklim. Setiap regional, negara, provinsi, kota hingga desa; dari skala besar hingga kecil, memiliki tantangan masing-masing akan permasalahan kepentingan air atau hydropolitics yang membutuhkan kerja sama berbagai pihak menjaga keberlanjutan ekosistem ini (Benson, Gain, & Rouillard, 2015;Goh, 2019;Roni & Beechie, 2013;Singh, Yadav, & Yadava, 2017;Wantzen et al., 2019). Di kawasan Asia Tenggara (ASEAN), karena konteks geografis kepulauan, Indonesia termasuk berbeda dengan negara-negara lainnya yang memiliki sumberdaya air bersih transboundary (Salmoral, Schaap, Walschebauer, & Alhajaj, 2019); dimana sumber daya air bersih Indonesia cenderung dikelola personal, sehingga memiliki pola kepentingan yang berbeda. ...
... Dengan semakin meningkatnya jumlah restorasi ekosistem di masa yang akan datang (Roni & Beechie, 2013; B. S. Thompson, 2018;Townsend, Begon, & Harper, 2008); kemudian meningkatnya perhatian akan peran air dan badan air dalam kehidupan manusia (Goh, 2019;Wantzen et al., 2019); serta berubah dan bertambahnya aktor yang mengurus lingkungan (Bryant & Bailey, 1997;Pichler & Brad, 2016; B. S. Thompson, 2018). Riset terkait keterlibatan militer dalam permasalahan lingkungan terlebih pemulihan lingkungan menjadi hal yang menarik untuk dicari tahu lebih lanjut. ...
In 2018, the Indonesian government made a policy for the restoration of the Citarum watershed that involved multiple actors in improving the watershed, with one peculiar actor in restoration, the military. This anomaly creates new patterns and dynamics in restoration. Previous studies in the United States, India, and Botswana have shown a positive relationship between the military and civilian actors, thereby increasing the positive impact of environmental policies. This research aims to examine how the military's influence on watershed restoration is environmental and social; as well as conceptualizing how optimization can be carried out within the framework of the military involved in restoration. The study was conducted in the Citarum Harum program using in-depth interviews, multi-level stakeholders influence mapping, and soft system methodology on several informants in the restoration program. The author finds shifts in actor relationships that create improvements in restoration. However, several problems also emerged, such as overlapping authorities, differences in perceptions of restoration techniques, and desynchronization between civil-military program. These problems require adjustments to the roles of both civilian and military in the restoration program, to optimize restoration.
... We also note reports that some island governments, notably those of Vanuatu and Samoa, have made a conscious and reasonably effective effort to get around this siloing by strengthening the central agency dealing with climate change (Weir et al. 2017). With a focus on Jakarta, Goh (2019) outlines the issue of urban flooding and advocates for a multidimensional and multivalent approach, taking into account the perspectives applied to this issue of urban ecological change from within biophysics, urban governance and socio-politics, stressing the need to be conscious of power relations and ensuring justice as significant urban and environmental plans are put forward. ...
... Additionally, they consider challenges of implementation, novel decision-making tools to address the changing nature of risks and the understudied arrangements in this area relating to governance, institutions and funding. In response to climate-induced migration within Pacific Island Countries and Territories, Campbell (2022) suggests that urban areas are most likely to be the only, or least problematic, migrant destinations, not to discount the climate challenges posed within urban areas as previously mentioned such as flooding (see Goh 2019), and long-term habitability challenges within urban atoll islands. As urbanisation progresses rapidly in many SIDS, with an associated rise in informal Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. ...
As the impacts of climate change increase, Small Island Developing States (SIDS) in particular shall face increasingly significant adaptation challenges. Past climate adaptation efforts within SIDS have had limited success. As such, the purpose of this systematic literature review has been to identify areas of importance for facilitating climate adaptation, particularly within Small Island Developing States (SIDS), and more specifically, to assess the extent to which participatory justice within decision-making processes is recognised as an important component of climate adaptation through the lens of water management. This review process utilised the SPIDER tool to guide the literature search across SCOPUS, Web of Science and EBSCO host databases, generating 495 publications that were reduced to a total of 70 sources guided by PRISMA, informing the review's results and discussion. Thematic analysis of the selected studies was applied, utilising the Values-Rules-Knowledge framework. Through this analysis, five principles were created and comprise the major conclusions of this review: (1) ensuring community engagement, (2) expanding available options through local experimentation, (3) ensuring that monitoring and evaluation of adaptation initiatives are taken seriously, (4) adopting decision-making mechanisms that are systems-oriented and inclusive, and (5) investing only if there is a long-term commitment to protecting SIDS. It is hoped that these principles can serve as a comprehensive guide for funding agencies, applied projects and research aiding climate adaptation within SIDS.
... To analyse the recurrent remakings of wetlands, we engage in recent debates concerning state territorialisations, corporate resource-makings, infrastructural interventions, and changing environmental-social relations Goh, 2019;Harris, 2017;Li and Semedi, 2021;Lund, 2016;Scaramelli, 2018;Vandergeest and Peluso, 1995). We analyse the remakings of Tabascan and Central Kalimantan wetlands through what we call a 'political ecology of wetlands', drawing inspiration from discussions of shifting water-land interactions in human geography, global development studies, and anthropology of water (Ballestero, 2019;Boelens et al., 2016;Hastrup and Hastrup, 2016;Krause, 2017;Linton and Budds, 2014;Nygren, 2021;Richardson, 2018;Swyngedouw, 2015). ...
... Recent approaches of political ecology and anthropology of water also emphasise how attempts to bring water's unruliness under human control often fail due to water's ability to disrupt human-imposed water/land divides and socio-spatial orders (Goh, 2019;Linton and Budds, 2014). While conventional political ecology has mainly focused on the effects of development interventions on humans, our analysis attends to dynamic human-nonhuman interactions by considering how the environmental transformations produced by development interventions further remodify the wetland circumstances (Collard et al., 2018;Krause, 2021;Lounela, 2021b;Tsing, 2017). ...
This article analyses people's water-land relations in transformed wetlands through a lens that conceptualises aquatic and terrestrial aspects in wetland-dwellers' living spaces as blurred and shifting. By drawing on empirical research in Tabasco, Mexico, and Central Kalimantan, Indonesia, we examine how wetlands have been recurrently remade amidst multifaceted development interventions and how local people perceive and experience waterscape changes in their lives and livelihoods. There has been a strong emphasis on wetness and fluidity in research on riverine, deltaic, and other amphibious environments; however, we argue that privileging water as an analytical concept makes it hard to understand changing water-land fluctuations in wetlands as wetlands. By combining ideas from political ecology, critical geography, and anthropology of water, our analysis shows how local people engage in making watery areas more solid in order to get their land rights recognised and to cope with socially differentiated vulnerabilities within multifaceted state territorialisations and corporate resource-makings.
... More often than not, these have been grasped during moments of infrastructural urban change -whether in the context of historical port spaces and their afterlives (see Broeze, 2010), metropolitan waterfront revitalisation (see Cooper, 1987), or the role of coastal sites in sustaining social inequities and producing new exclusionary practices through urban spatial planning and environmental adaptation interventions, land privatization, real estate development, tourism and mining (see Gordon, 1997;Desfor & Laidley, 2010;Siriwardane-de Zoysa & Amoo-Adare, 2021). In addition, by often alluding to urban fresh waterscapes, post-structural, neo-Marxian and political ecological analyses have rendered nuanced discussions on power relations and social inequalities that these liquid materialities, sociotechnical infrastructures and metabolic flows have afforded (see Kaika et al., 2002;Gandy, 2008;Swyngedouw et al., 2002;Ballestero, 2019;Goh, 2019). ...
... However, many in the city simultaneously experience this modernization as a machine for inequality and displacement. As part of the flood management strategy, the city evicted a number of low-income communities living along rivers, part of a "river normalization" programme that widened rivers and built concrete embankments alongside swaths of the riverbed (Goh, 2019). The city has neglected or actively displaced communities living in the north, who experience the worst effects of subsidence and flooding. ...
... Several studies have stated that flooding in Jakarta is caused by sea-level rise and land subsidence. The rapid development in Jakarta has led to increased groundwater use so that Jakarta has decreased its land surface [5] [6] [7]. Land subsidence in Jakarta ranges from 1-15 cm per year and can reach 20-28 cm per year [5], meanwhile, the increase in seawater reaches 5.7 mm per year [7]. ...
... The rapid development in Jakarta has led to increased groundwater use so that Jakarta has decreased its land surface [5] [6] [7]. Land subsidence in Jakarta ranges from 1-15 cm per year and can reach 20-28 cm per year [5], meanwhile, the increase in seawater reaches 5.7 mm per year [7]. ...
This paper focuses on community strategy in slum areas to adapt to the flood in Jakarta that occur every year. Sea-level rise and land subsidence are some of the causes of Jakarta’s flood. Jakarta is affected by floods every year. Communities need a development strategy to be able to survive from the unpredictable floods each year. This paper aims to identify the application of community strategy as an effort to adapt to Jakarta’s flood in Kampung Apung , West Jakarta. Kampung Apung is one of the slum areas in Jakarta that has been affected by floods since 1995. The flood was caused by land subsidence and worsened by development around the kampung that ignore the environment in the ’90s. Now, Kampung Apung has been submerged in water as deep as 2 meters. This paper uses the descriptive-qualitative method. Data obtained from field observations, documents from the internet, and online interviews with the key informant in Kampung Apung . The result of the paper is to find a community strategy to living with flood in the slum area which is one of the efforts to be able to improve quality of life.
... Importantly, these operations aiming to drain land and compartmentalize water make some forms of human and non-human coastal life possible while destroying others. Hence in Jakarta, infrastructural interventions reinforce the dispossession of coastal residents through routinized evictions while creating lucrative investment opportunities for private developers willing to expand "offshore" (Batubara et al., 2023;Colven, 2023;Goh, 2019;Octavianti & Charles, 2018). Such evictions are common in Semarang too (Batubara et al., 2020), with infrastructural interventions causing the reduction of mangrove forests sheltering riverine and estuarine lives (Sejati et al., 2020) UPE argues for considering water and sediments as simultaneously social and natural, an argument that resonates with and is extended by recent pleas by anthropologists and geographers to de-universalize and de-essentialize the land-water distinction (Lahiri-Dutt, 2014). ...
Sinking cities populate imaginaries of the future in ways that resign entire populations of humans and non-humans to erasure. In this article, we take issue with the narrative of sinking as ‘losing ground to the sea’ through ethnographic research in the periphery of Semarang, Indonesia. Drawing on recent scholarship that calls
for de-essentializing the water-land divide, we set out to write an amphibious history of the North Coast of Java. We do this by following shrimp- and fishponds, or “tambak” through time. Tambak are ambiguous spaces of encounter for the decisive protagonists of North Java coastal history: sediments, fresh- and tidal-waters, shrimp, pond workers, and developers. We mobilize tambak as an ethnographic device to re-tell three episodes of this
history: the shifts of tidal flows shaping coastal landscapes since the 1900s; the enclosure of ponds due to shrimp farming intensification in the 1980s; and more recently, land speculation and the coerced acquisition of submerged and contaminated land. These three episodes, or so we argue, are connected by the struggle between amphibiousness and purification, aimed at separating land from water. The outcome of this struggle is not
settled, as projects of purification never fully succeed. Yet, purity-oriented practices and projects to make dry land do cause coastal dispossession and the loss of more-than-human relations in and around the ponds. Driven by concerns for these losses, we propose a shift in the politics of coastal subsidence from the purification of land from water, towards the maintenance and reinforcement of more-than-human amphibious relations.
... The urban imaginary of the smart city, an imaginary based on techno-optimistic mindsets, has been particularly opposed by collective visions of catastrophe-struck cities (Rothe, 2020;Cassegård and Thörn, 2022). Increasingly present in the urban public sphere are collective visions of 'the drowning city' (Goh, 2019), 'the empty city' (Pohl, 2022), and 'the radiant city' (Dobraszczyk, 2010). Actors adhering to catastrophic collective visions do, of course, not conceive of these visions as desirable futures. ...
... Flood mapping is conducted to support decision-makers in determining policies for such events, using an approach based on rainfall patterns and land use and land cover (LULC) management (Mishra et al., 2018). Furthermore, flooding is a dynamic and multidimensional phenomenon (Smith et al., 2017;Goh, 2019). Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are a potent tool for processing, analyzing, and making decisions related to determining flood-prone zones in a particular area. ...
Floods are caused by the accumulation of several factors, such as global warming, climatological characteristics, hydrology, and physical conditions of an area. The purpose of this study was to map the level of flood vulnerability in the core zone of the Lore Lindu Biosphere Reserve using geographic information system (GIS) based spatial analysis with scoring and overlay. The research parameters consisted of rainfall, elevation, slope, soil type, land cover, and distance from the river. This research was conducted in the core zone divided into 13 subdistricts and 2 regencies. The results of the classification of flood vulnerability levels are divided into 4 (four) categories: not prone, low vulnerability, moderate vulnerability, and high vulnerability. The results of the analysis show that the core zone of the Lore Lindu biosphere reserve is dominated by a non-hazardous site with an area of 145,018.28 ha (67.23%), a low vulnerability zone of 65,430.10 ha (30.33%), a moderate vulnerability zone of 5,025.29 ha (2.33%), and a high vulnerability zone of 245.99 ha (0.11). Areas with a high level of vulnerability are at low elevations with flat to gentle slopes. Most land use is dominated by water, mining, and open land without vegetation, and it is located around rivers.
... While much of the expansion in the Jakarta Metropolitan Area over the last thirty years has taken place on the outskirts, the central region (the Special Capital Region of Jakarta) still witnesses urbanization in the form of increased density (Roberts, Gil Sander, & Tiwari, 2019). This central area exhibits formal and informal urban development patterns (Zhu & Simamarta, 2015;Goh, 2019), mirroring trends in other large cities in developing nations. This paper employs built-up area data from the Joint Research Center of the European Commission, population figures from Statistics Indonesia (Badan Pusat Statistik or BPS) and the Jakarta Government, flood maps sourced from Álvarez and Resosudarmo (2019) and the Meteorological, Climatological, and Geophysical Agency (Badan Meteorologi, Klimatologi, dan Geofisika or BMKG), and additional geospatial information pertaining to DKI Jakarta from 1990 to 2015 provided by the Geospatial Information Agency Indonesia. ...
Climate change has intensified flooding risks for megacities near water bodies, such as Jakarta, Indonesia. Both private and public sectors might respond to significant flooding events, and this reaction can manifest in aspects of urban form like population density and land use patterns. Using Ordinary Least Square estimation, we examine the correlation between major flood events from 1990 to 2014 and subsequent shifts in Jakarta's urban landscape. Our results suggest that greater exposure to significantly major floods, such as the 2007 event, correlates with accelerated expansion of built-up areas. Conversely, exposure to moderately major floods, like in 2013, is linked to marked increases in population density. Furthermore, regions intersected by canals exhibit more pronounced urban growth than areas without canals.
... Considering these points, it is both challenging and contentious to assess urban livability through holistic and commonly agreed approaches and metrics 25,94,95 . The growing consensus within the literature [96][97][98] suggests that the design and implementation of urban livability assessments/metrics should consider: (a) multiple dimensions of urban livability, (b) reflect the specific context of the assesssments and the goals of the researchers, and (c) integrate insights/methods from multiple fields. Broadly speaking urban livability assessments should consider dimensions that are integral to the quality of life, such as a healthy living environment, good access to transport/ amenities/services, and interactions between citizens and their surroundings 28,66,99 . ...
Urban livability has become a major policy and practice priority in many parts of the world. However, its attainment remains challenging in many cities of developing and emerging economies. The lack of data with appropriate quality, coverage, and spatial and temporal resolution often complicates both the assessment of livability in such cities and the identification of priority areas for improvement. Here we develop a framework to mobilize and synthesize open-source data to analyze spatially urban livability patterns in Shanghai. The framework brings together diverse types of open-source data including housing characteristics, population distribution, transportation networks, and points of interest to identify city areas with low livability, and thus priority areas for improvement. Such findings can provide a comprehensive overview of the residential living conditions in Shanghai, as well as useful information to urban planners and decision-makers. Furthermore, subject to data availability, the proposed method has the potential for application in other cities.
... There is already growing criticism around the current modes of climate change adaptation strategies and practices which prioritize the protection of core economic functions of cities and the re-direction of financial investments into spatially selective technological and lowcarbon infrastructural fixes over the wellbeing of the urban poor (Castán Broto & Robin, 2021;Long & Rice, 2019;McArdle, 2021). These climate actions secure more sustainable enclaves for the wealthy while further marginalizing and dispossessing subaltern groups (Goh, 2019;Robin et al., 2020). ...
Climate research in the Global South tends to focus on large (>10 million population) cities. However, most of the urban poor in the South live in smaller cities. The knowledge and experience of the urban poor in smaller cities is highly contextualized, therefore, knowledge about these cities and the plight of their subaltern populations and the contours of informality cannot easily be 'extrapolated' from megacities. Rather than empirical prescriptions this paper makes a methodological argument for an epistemologically just approach to engaging with those left behind through a shift towards co-producing climate knowledge with marginalized communities and their actual lived contexts in these overlooked cities. In doing so, the paper makes a case for widening the current scope of climate change research in ways that can support climate action to effectively contribute towards achieving the SDGs' commitment of leaving no one and no place behind.
... Living and green shorelines!) for our current coastal woes. A broader understanding of the temporal dimensions of humancoastal interactions may also be valuable for confronting contemporary issues that are wrapped up in diffi cult cycles of decision-making and subsequent impacts, including the vexing problem of extraction-induced subsidence (Goh 2019). We have deep histories and archaeologies that tell us quite a bit about what happens when certain courses of action have been staked out. ...
This article explores the anthropological and social scientific literature on sea level rise and coastal erosion, examining questions of time, the human dimensions of seawalls, tensions over relocation and retreat, and the politics of finance. This includes insights from the author's research in Baja California Sur, Mexico, and along the California coast in the United States, where locally based experiences illustrate not only the challenges of rising seas and erosion, but also the importance of addressing these issues, sooner rather than later, through the critical lenses of anthropology. Overall, this article explores how anthropologists and other social scientists have critically examined the issues, processes, and tensions that shape global coastal responses, and points to directions for future research and engagement with sea level rise, eroding coasts, and humanity's future along the edge of the sea.
... Scholars have suggested that the assessments of urban livability should be designed and undertaken in a manner that (a) reflects the specific geographical context, (b) integrates insights from critical social sciences (e.g. Human Geography, Urban Geography), and (c) reflects wider economic and urban governance issues (Goh, 2019;Haworth, 2003). However, despite the growing consensus that it is indeed important to establish ways of assessing urban livability in a multi-dimensional and context-specific manner, there are very diverse viewpoints as to what this interface of urbanization and livability entails. ...
Urban livability has become a major policy and practice priority in many parts of the world, but its attainment remains challenging in many cities of developing and emerging economies. The lack of data with appropriate quality, coverage, and spatial/temporal resolution often complicates the assessment of livability in such cities, and the identification of priority areas for improvement. Here we develop an innovative framework to mobilize and synthesize open-source data to analyze spatially urban livability patterns in Shanghai. The framework brings together diverse open-source data such as housing prices, population distribution, transportation networks, and points of interest to identify city areas with low livability, and thus priority areas for improvement. Such findings can provide a comprehensive overview of the residential living environment in Shanghai, as well as provide useful information to urban planners and decision-makers. Furthermore, the developed method has the potential for application in other cities, subject to data availability.
... There are several underlying reasons, namely DKI Jakarta often has not found a solution to the city, including; floods [3,4]; River water contamination, urban heat islands, and air pollution are all problems [5,6]. As a coastal city, DKI Jakarta is susceptible to risks from the sea and climate change [7][8][9]; it is also a location where interactions between landforms and oceans take place [10]; the weight of buildings and infrastructure built on cities poses a risk of subsidence or land subsidence [11,12], With the existence of one of the recent phenomena of climate change-the rise of the sea surface-this hazard may be considerably larger. The government of the Republic of Indonesia is encouraged by the description of the phenomenon DKI Jakarta is dealing with to implement the plan to move IKN to East Kalimantan as soon as possible; as the focal point of the new administration in Indonesia [13]. ...
... Careful integration of qualitative and quantitative approaches is crucial especially in global development studies, which aims to explain and understand multifaceted development interventions and their socially differentiated impacts on targeted populations in the global South, as well as the discursive and institutional mechanisms involved (Hall et al. 2015;Lund 2016). Qualitative-quantitative integration is fundamental for understanding the processes and outcomes of multifaceted projects of land grabbing and resource extractivism Hall et al. 2015;Leifsen 2017;Nygren et al. 2022), people's relocation due to conservation projects, or the construction of different sorts of infrastructure (Büscher and Ramutsindela 2016;Goh 2019;Harris 2012;Schindler et al. 2019), as well as the displacement-resettlement schemes linked to territorialization and strengthening of state authority in diverse contexts of the global South (Rasmussen and Lund 2018;Sud 2021). This is especially crucial under circumstances of legal pluralism and authoritarian governance (Kelly and Peluso 2015;Sekine 2021). ...
This article contributes to mixed-methods research in global development studies. It draws on empirical study of changes in access to livelihood resources ensuing from state-sponsored resettlement schemes in Oromia, Ethiopia. The analysis demonstrates that explaining and understanding processes and outcomes of development interventions can be expanded and deepened by the integration of quantitative and qualitative methods. Quantitative analysis uncovers the magnitude of changes, whereas qualitative analysis reveals political power relations and contextual meanings of the changes as experienced by affected people. The study shows that mixed-methods approach enables addressing the statistical and substantive significance of the variables in question and the diversity of meanings and experiences associated with development interventions. This strengthens the analytical power of research, providing opportunities to enhance evidence-based comprehension of generic patterns and specific conditions and outcomes of development interventions in diversified situations of the global South.
... In Jakarta, the attempts of critical scholars to politicise the cause of this phenomenon largely follow the explanations of the biophysical process as given by geoscientists' and engineers' (see, van Voorst and Hellman (2015); Padawangi and Douglass (2015); Colven (2017); Wade (2018); Sheppard (2018); Saputra (2019)). Critical social scientists have shown how the issue of land subsidence is used to support the development of giant infrastructure (Octavianti and Charles 2018); how it is enmeshed within the uneven socionatural transformation of the city (Goh 2019); and how the "invisibility" of groundwater makes it difficult to assess its relation to subsidence (Colven 2020). We respect how these scholars seek to make sense of the causes of land subsidence, and seek to build on their analyses and join their political motivations. ...
Jakarta is sinking dramatically because of land subsidence, which in turn increases its vulnerability to tidal flooding. The explanation of land subsidence's causes and the design of solutions is led by geoscientists and engineers, who tend to treat it as largely a technical problem. This paper takes issue with this. It sets out to contribute to politicizing land subsidence by analysing it as part of the sociospatial and socionatural transformations that characterize processes of urbanization. We propose an approach that allows showing how subsidence happens through urbanization's interconnected moments of horizontal concentration, vertical extension, and differentiation-the weight of the built environment, the expansion of deep groundwater wells, and the remaking of the city (and beyond). By investigating the sociospatial correlation between land subsidence and the development of buildings, and the temporal correlation between land subsidence and the increase of groundwater wells we illustrate how land subsidence is intrinsic to (post-) New Order capitalism (1965-1998 and 1998-now). We also show that it proceeds in uneven ways: those who cause subsidence are not the ones who suffer most from it. Through a serious treatment of soil-water dynamics, our socionatural theorization also helps appreciate how urbanization is always co-shaped by interactions between human and non-human processes.
... More often than not, these have been grasped during moments of infrastructural urban change -whether in the context of historical port spaces and their afterlives (see Broeze, 2010), metropolitan waterfront revitalisation (see Cooper, 1987), or the role of coastal sites in sustaining social inequities and producing new exclusionary practices through urban spatial planning and environmental adaptation interventions, land privatization, real estate development, tourism and mining (see Gordon, 1997;Desfor & Laidley, 2010;Siriwardane-de Zoysa & Amoo-Adare, 2021). In addition, by often alluding to urban fresh waterscapes, post-structural, neo-Marxian and political ecological analyses have rendered nuanced discussions on power relations and social inequalities that these liquid materialities, sociotechnical infrastructures and metabolic flows have afforded (see Kaika et al., 2002;Gandy, 2008;Swyngedouw et al., 2002;Ballestero, 2019;Goh, 2019). ...
... The biophysical aspect can be described by the geology, geographical features, climate, and ecology of a coastal region, while socio-economic activities, such as land use change, population growth, socio-demographic status, and economic activities, can determine the sensitivity to hazards (Goharian et al., 2017;Wheater & Evans, 2009). Throughout ancient and even modern urbanization, the adaptive capacity of coasts has been undermined (Goh, 2019). The adaptive capacity of the coastal systems primarily depends on the socio-economic characteristics of the communities that reside in these regions (Berkes, 2007). ...
Estimating the exposure of the coastal systems to natural hazards using coastal vulnerability models, which benefits from index-based approaches and utilize information about the characteristics of the system, has become extensively adopted in the past few decades in coastal management and planning. However, the explanatory power of index-based approaches and subjective selection of vulnerability factors are still in dispute. This study aims to introduce a stochastic coastal vulnerability model and assess its skill in characterizing and preserving simultaneous information about various comprising factors. Two common coastal vulnerability indices, additive coastal vulnerability index (ACVI) and multiplicative coastal vulnerability index (MCVI) are formed, and then their performances are compared to the proposed probabilistic coastal vulnerability index (PCVI) for the coastal counties of South Carolina. PCVI is developed based on the joint-probability analysis of vulnerability factors using copula functions, which makes it capable of preserving the importance of multivariate information, and in turn, forms a more informative index. The performance of indices is benchmarked against post-hazard flood maps and the cost of fatalities from Hurricane Florence (2018) and Hurricane Matthew (2016). The PCVI revealed more accurate results in terms of explaining the importance of vulnerability associated with biophysical and socio-economic factors. The capability of PCVI to preserve multivariate vulnerability information offers a more pragmatic approach to reflect the exposure and adaptive capacity of coastal communities facing coastal hazards.
... Numerous studies have examined similar issues in infamous "slum" areas encroaching on river embankments in cities such as Mumbai in India (Chatterjee, 2010), Dhaka in Bangladesh (Braun & Aßheuer, 2011), Jakarta in Indonesia (Padawangi & Douglass, 2015), Durban in South Africa (Williams et al., 2018), Accra (Twum & Abubakari, 2019) and various medium-sized cities in Pakistan (Rana & Routray, 2018), Malawi (Kita, 2017;Manda & Wanda, 2017), South Africa (Ogundeji et al., 2013) and Ghana (Danso & Addo, 2017). Commonly, these encroachments of the poor on marginal lands are perceived as illegal by urban authorities and residents typically face threats of or actual execution of evictions, demolitions and resettlement measures in the name of public safety (Ajibade & McBean, 2014;Alvarez & Cardenas, 2019;Amoako, 2016;Carrasco & Dangol, 2019;Goh, 2019;Kita, 2017;Padawangi & Douglass, 2015). ...
Urban flood risk is significantly shaped by ground conditions and the built environment , which are constantly modified and transformed by human actions. This paper examines the intertwinement of flood risk and unregulated urban expansion processes in three selected sites in Accra's expanding periphery. All three sites have been included in Accra's urban extent since the 1990s, but differ with regard to the timing of development and socioeconomic characteristics of residents. The research illuminates how flood risk is produced and "built-in" to the urban fabric through widespread practices associated with unregulated urban expansion processes, especially the persistent encroachment on water retention areas, wetlands and riparian zones and the highly fragmented provision of transport infrastructure in emerging residential areas in the periphery. Such harmful development practices are neither confined to homebuilders from poorer segments of the urban population nor spatially concentrated in low-income areas. The research highlights how the actions and inactions of a wide range of social groups and actors engaged in urban land administration and development contribute to flood risk in various ways, making flooding an increasingly alarming issue of citywide concern. Different stakeholders highlight fragmented urban governance as an underlying root cause for the obstruction of sustainable land and water management. Overall, the study calls for a more robust recognition of spatial planning and transport infrastructure provision in flood risk mitigation and highlights the urgent need for planning and governance practices that challenge the existing fragmentation of urban governance systems.
... Recently, the interest in the retention capacity of catchments has grown significantly [1]. This results from the increasing frequency of floods and their negative consequences, resulting in economic and social losses [2]. Thus, it is important to note the retention capacity of a catchment [3]. ...
Studies on water quality are necessary, as catchments of small watercourses are exposed to anthropogenic influences associated with agricultural activities, settlement, transport and other undertakings, leading to water pollution. There has been insufficient research performed on the valley’s ability to retain nutrients during floods, contributing to water accumulation. The main object of the study was to identify the retention capacity of river valleys under various aspects of human urbanization. To represent soil water retention, the Soil Conservation Service Curve Number (SCS-CN) method was used. Spatiotemporal autoregressive models were exploited to investigate the relationship between pollutants in precipitation and surface water in rivers. In contrast, multivariate analysis was used to identify and reveal patterns of land use for specific chemical compounds in the headwaters. The canonical-correlation analysis (CCA) showed that Mg+2 and Ca+2 cations in rainwater and surface waters play the main roles in the geochemical cycle in urban and rural areas. In the urban catchment area, the strongest relations were found for NO3−, K+ and Na+. The average NO3− concentration in urban headwater was 8.3 mg·dm−3, the highest in the study area. The relationship between NO3− concentration in headwater and rainwater was found for all study catchments using spatial autoregression (SAR). High concentrations of SO42− in surface water have been identified in urban areas. Severe water erosion raises the risk of nutrient leaching in soils prone to surface runoff. As a consequence of low soil permeability and urbanization, retention capacity is significantly reduced in areas with low soil permeability. Land development plans should take spatial retention capacity into consideration. To ensure that large reservoirs can retain water in the face of climate change, riparian buffer zones (protective zones in valleys for small water bodies as well as Nature-based Solution) are important.
... As a city located on the coast, where interactions between land and ocean landscapes occur Harris et al., (2019), DKI Jakarta also has potential hazards related to the sea and climate change (Firman et al., 2011;Goh, 2019;Nurhidayah & McIlgorm, 2019). Many buildings and infrastructure erected on top of the city pose a danger of subsidence or land subsidence (Andreas et al., 2018;Chaussard et al., 2013;Park et al., 2016). ...
The construction of a New Capital City (IKN) will have major implications for the equitable distribution of national welfare. The development of the National Capital Region (IKN) is a national strategic project that is considered to be able to increase economic growth and equitable distribution of national welfare. There are data that explain empirically the explanatory material that has been discussed. It can be emphasized that in the short term, the development of the IKN can encourage economic activity through infrastructure investment in the IKN and surrounding areas. Then encourage trade between regions, and open up job creation opportunities. This paper also recommends that development in the context of welfare is not only a matter of increasing economic impact after the development of IKN in PPU and Kukar. However, in the context of the perspective of local community involvement in the stages of IKN development, it must be included, especially the contribution to recommendations for strengthening the socio-cultural aspect. The analysis used in this paper is descriptive qualitative research. In collecting data to support this research will track through data from the Central Statistics Agency (BPS) and National Development Planning Agency (BAPPENAS) for each area affected by IKN.
... The waterscape is used to describe spatial outcomes of hydrosocial processes, especially the reproduction of structural socio-spatial inequalities, and their evolution through time. A connection can be made to the fluid, everchanging aspect that characterises the notion of landscape (Goh 2019). Recalling the socionatural (Rodriguez-de-Francisco and Boelens 2016) and metaphorical (Appadurai 1990) dimension of landscape, various authors indeed insist on the fact that waterscapes change in 'space and time' (Buscher 2019;Perreault 2014). ...
Over the past two decades, ‘waterscape’ and ‘hydrosocial territory’ have gained momentum in political ecologies of water. These concepts explore the material outcomes of the interplay of social and biophysical processes by building on two different core concepts of geography (‘landscape’ and ‘territory’). Relying on a quantitative and qualitative analysis of a corpus comprising 113 articles (1999–2019), this paper investigates the commonalities and divergences in the spatialities of water that these concepts convey. We show that the two concepts delineate two close but nevertheless different analytical threads with regard to water-related spatialities. Yet, the use of the concepts waterscape or hydrosocial territory does not directly result from a theorisation of space that would be specific to different spatial contexts, but rather from what is studied in these spaces, that is, the socio-spatial inequalities or injustices that characterise them, and the transformations – either radical or incremental – that shape them.
... The precariousness of living alongside canals and rivers in Jakarta has increased over the past two decades (Goh, 2019a). Flood events have become ever more frequent (Padawangi and Douglass, 2015), triggering state-led flood management interventions geared at the removal of low-income settlements. ...
This thesis aims to inform critical thinking of and acting on flood events and flood infrastructure development in Jakarta, to call attention to how they are deeply political. It explains how both the occurrence of flooding and the development of flood infrastructure in contemporary Jakarta are partly the result of, and in turn help to create a particular trajectory of Indonesia’s (post-) New Order regime (1965-1998 and 1998-now) uneven urbanization. Equipped with ‘political ecology of urbanization’ explanatory framework and ‘ecologized dialectical method’, this thesis repoliticizes, and opens possibilities on how to think through and confront, the uneven urbanization of (post-) New Order regime in its relation to the production of Jakarta’s flood events and development of flood infrastructures involving human and nonhuman in the city and beyond, above and below ground.
... For example, the vegetative coverage across Jakarta has become very low because of excessive urbanization (Figure 2a) [50]. In addition, as Jakarta is heavily polluted and freshwater resources are scarce, residents overexploit underground water without the government's permission, thereby causing the surface of Jakarta to sink every year [51][52][53][54]. Consequently, secondary disasters caused by land subsidence frequently occur during urban floods. ...
Urban resilience to natural disasters (e.g., flooding), in the context of climate change, has
been becoming increasingly important for the sustainable development of cities. This paper presents a
method to assess the urban resilience to flooding in terms of the recovery rate of different subdistricts
in a city using all-weather synthetic aperture radar imagery (i.e., Sentinel-1A imagery). The factors
that influence resilience, and their relative importance, are then determined through principal component
analysis. Jakarta, a flood-prone city in Indonesia, is selected as a case study. The resilience of
42 subdistricts in Jakarta, with their gross domestic product data super-resolved using nighttime-light
satellite images, was assessed. The association between resilience levels and influencing factors, such as
topology, mixtures of religion, and points-of-interest density, were subsequently derived. Topographic
factors, such as elevation (coefficient = 0.3784) and slope (coefficient = 0.1079), were found to have the
strongest positive influence on flood recovery, whereas population density (coefficient = 0.1774) a
negative effect. These findings provide evidence for policymakers to make more pertinent strategies to
improve flood resilience, especially in subdistricts with lower resilience levels.
... Labour conditions vary widely and scholars have identified new modes of surplus value extraction beyond shop floors and formal-sector waged labourers (Gago, 2017;Strauss, 2018). Precarity also implicates access to housing (Mun˜oz, 2018) and forms of endangerment (Zeiderman, 2016a) including exposure to toxic hazards (Auyero and Swistun, 2009;Chan, 2019); natural and human-factor disasters -devastating floods and fires (Endo, 2014;Goh, 2019;Zeiderman, 2016b); and underserviced basic needs -water supply and sanitation (Desai et al., 2015). It is essential to recognise that these are not limited to consolidated cities but also extend to rapidly expanding peri-urban areas where limited and unequal access to public institutions such as hospitals and schools exacerbates precarity (Gordillo, 2019). ...
Contemporary development policy portrays enhanced connectivity as the key to fostering economic growth in lagging regions. This global policy consensus and consequent infrastructure scramble have resulted in a proliferation of new urban spaces. These are dispersed, fragmentary and often unrecognised as urban by projects and plans centred on large-scale connective infrastructures to integrate remote regions into circuits of capital. Whilst our understanding of infrastructure-led development is informed by critical engagements with planetary urbanisation, global infrastructure and logistics, this position paper seeks to reconcile political economy analyses with situated studies closer to lived forms of heterogeneous precariousness in emerging urban worlds. Addressing recent debates that frame these bodies of scholarship as antagonistic, we emphasise the supplementarity of perspectives from within and beyond urban studies. This pluralism can be practised through comparisons that will (i) trace the geo-economic relationality of mega-infrastructures, which conditions directly and indirectly their planning, financing, construction and management, and (simultaneously or independently) (ii) examine difference in the diverse experiences of and responses to emergent infrastructural urbanisms of precarity. The article shows that genetic and generative comparisons can inform a research agenda on (peri-)urban precariousness, engaging policies with unmistakable global moorings but complex multi-scalar politics, diverging outcomes and situated resistances and appropriations.
... The precariousness of living alongside canals and rivers in Jakarta has increased over the past two decades (Goh 2019a). Flood events have become ever more frequent (Padawangi and Douglass 2015), triggering state-led flood management interventions geared at the removal of low-income settlements. ...
This article explores the relationship between the uneven outcomes of development in Indonesian cities with exclusionary outcomes of capitalist development in rural areas. Combining concepts of planetary urbanization with critical agrarian studies, we show how sociospatial and socionatural differentiations in (post-) New Order Java result in the emergence of the Kaum Miskin Kota, a ‘stagnant relative surplus population’ residing in precarious flood-prone urban spaces. These forms of differentiation are dialectically related to rural enclosures caused by the creation of political forest and political water. Tracing such relations forms a good basis to connect rural- and urban-based social movements.
... Theses, dissertations and reports flourished, focusing on this urban site as a case study. They first dealt with poverty alleviation and flood management (Texier 2009;Leitner et al. 2017;Voorst 2016;Goh 2019;Padawangi and Douglass 2015;Manurung 2014;Vollmer et al. 2015). But, as the ngo started to fight against evictions, they began to analyse eviction processes in Jakarta (almost all of the authors after 2015). ...
As a megacity, Jakarta has enjoyed mixed forms of residential neighbourhoods, in which the kampungs used to prevail. After a period of kampung rehabilitation, relocation programmes intensified in Jakarta in the 1980s, influenced by the Singaporean model and paradigmatic shifts in international policies for housing for the poor. As a reaction, various local NGO s have proposed alternative solutions to what can seem a hegemonic international trend. Starting from the imposition of international models for housing for the poor, this paper studies how local NGO s in Jakarta have tried to negotiate these hegemonic global shifts and to propose other types of solutions. It first analyses the context of urban transformation in the central zones and the eradication of several kampungs . It then addresses the NGO s’ alternative visions of the city and its future, before showing how these visions are deeply rooted in formal and informal networks specific to the Indonesian context.
... The turn to 'watery edges' as a means of recentring what is opaque or 'indifferent to urban regimes of control' (Hopewell, 2020, p.206) has taken on especial relevance at a time when warming seas and rising sea levels have made coastal cities the site of present and future catastrophes (Goh, 2019). For example, Mentz has argued that 'ecological crises, extreme storms, and growing recall of oceanic presence are returning New York's salt-water identity' (2015, p. xiii) after a 'long historical pause' in which it 'turned its back on the sea' (2015, p. xii). ...
At a time when seabird populations have experienced steep declines and the movement of diverse species into cities has become a globally important issue, the paper examines the contested presence of an urban seabird colony in North East England. Drawing on ethnographic research, the paper details how avian claims to space have prompted fraught debates on coexistence, urban planning, and socio‐environmental futures that reveal an inherently ambivalent politics. While normally a coastal breeding bird, the paper argues that the Tyne kittiwakes – and their use of window ledges, drain‐pipes, streetlights, rooftops and road infrastructure – have become a familiar part of the region's urban life. However, while their presence has reworked understandings of public space, urban belonging, and oceanic boundaries, urban regimes of control and normative notions of the city continue to inhibit a more expansive urban politics capable of accommodating difference and responding to environmental change. Through attention to practices of deterrence, shifting forms of urban decision‐making, and the emergence of the kittiwake as a regional icon, the paper documents the conditions that limit coexistence despite a change in attitudes towards the colony and environmental futures more broadly. In this context, the paper raises fundamental questions about how to support coexistence amid ambivalence without resorting to normative forms of species valorisation. Attending to ambivalence and the difficulty of creating and sustaining ethical modes of coexistence, the paper reflects on the implications of the research for urban futures, local geographies of the sea, and the multispecies city.
Attraverso un excursus storico, lo studio analizza la gestione delle risorse idriche nel processo di sviluppo urbano e i relativi effetti nell'area di Milano. Avendo come riferimento teorico principale le categorie dell'Ecologia Politica Urbana (Heynen et al., 2006), nell'articolo si enfatizza il cambiamento socio-ecologico relativo all'‘addomesticamento' dell'acqua come pratica de-socializzante e la sua gestione come processo altamente conflittuale, in quanto espressione di particolari ideologie, scelte economico-politiche e fantasie sociali. In ultima analisi si fa riferimento all'annosa questione legata alle esondazioni del fiume Seveso e alla riapertura dei navigli come esempio di governance legata a una certa idea di sviluppo territoriale e di gestione delle acque urbane. L'effetto ultimo è quello di produrre ‘vincitori e vinti' nell'appropriazione e nella gestione stessa della natura.
Floodplain societies decide whether to protect themselves against floods (fight), live with floods (adapt), or adopt an approach that represents some combination of the two. The formation of a levee system is an important factor in determining whether a society fights or adapts to floods; however, these factors have been considered fixed boundaries in previous studies in human–flood interactions. We analyze a levee system transformation process covering the past century, from the indigenous ring-type levee system with floods to modern continuous levees against floods in the Kiso River basin in Japan by applying a historical sociohydrological approach. The results show degradation processes of the indigenous levee system and traditional communities alongside the installation of modern continuous levees, and a trade-off relationship was observed between the lengths of both. There are interactions between the levee systems and the human–water system through various water uses and different-scale components, and the dynamics within the region are connected to external socioeconomic trends through the installed modern levees and institutions.
One of the major dangers to the survival of river ecosystems, particularly in developing nations, is sand mining. Unchecked urbanization is the main factor causing this illicit activity. Sand is a significant and essential component of the concrete jungles that make up urban building. Sand becomes a crucial resource as a result, but its supply is unfortunately controlled. Comparing river sand to other types of sand or replacement materials, river sand excels in terms of quality, shape, durability, mineral composition, and availability. As per UNEP-GEAS, 2014 river sand is the most consumed resource, which is naturally available and globally comprises about 85% of minerals (by weight) extracted annually. This cheap natural resource and its diverse properties make it a crucial resource for other industries like electroplating, glass, ceramics, aircraft, etc. As a result, sand mining has become more popular in recent years, whether officially or illegally, especially in growing nations like China and India. Reviewing the effects of sand mining on the elements of river biomes and using cutting-edge technology to monitor these activities were the goals of this study. The study found that illegal sand mining, which harms both the environment and society economically, has grown to be the most underappreciated threat to the river ecology. The monitoring and evaluation of the sand resources and the mining activities have been made easier with the use of remote sensing and satellite data from sources like LANDSAT, BHUVAN, and others in geographic information systems (GIS) software like ArcGIS, QGIS. Many corrective actions are being taken, such as the use of demolition and construction debris, M-sand, and quarry dust, although these alternatives may not always be affordable and environmentally compassionate. Therefore, to handle the demand of the mining activities, research funding is needed to identify better sand substitutes. In order to interrupt the cycle of illicit mining and implement strong regulations against the sand mafias, there is a critical need to raise awareness among the locals and residents. To protect the soil, water, aquatic life, and socioeconomic stability of the residents, better watershed management plans also need to be implemented.
It has become common to attribute the growing frequency and severity of floods to climate change. But the factors behind flooding are many, and climate change often disappears from the equation at the local level. This study draws on interviews with key informants and community members and focus group discussions to explore the increasing incidence of flooding in two sub-districts in Eastern Thailand. To our surprise, there was little sense of community anger: flood risk had increased; the causes rooted in maladaptation linked to land conversion were recognised and uncontested; and injustice was palpable. But anger and resistance were muted. The paper seeks to make sense of this situation. Villagers accepted their complicity in creating the conditions for heightened flood risk through their willingness to sell their land for conversion. The disconnection between the identification of causality and the allocation of blame raises questions about how notions of environmental justice play out in places like Ban Thapma and Ban Nhonglalok, where justice and injustice do not fall equally across space and society.
Climate-related hazards, urban development and changing vulnerability patterns compel cities across the world to deal with new and emerging forms of risk. Academic literature and recent international policy documents suggest potentials of conceptually and practically linking the fields of climate change adaptation (CCA) and disaster risk reduction (DRR) and emphasize the need to mitigate climate-related risks at local level. However, there is limited knowledge on how this link is established at local levels and the role of ground-level actors and practices therein. Using the case of recurrent and disastrous floods, this paper discusses the significance of linking DRR and CCA in Mumbai. It analyses policies, plans, institutions and interventions related to DRR and CCA and uses interviews and a field study to assess flood risk governance at the level of municipal wards and neighbourhoods. The findings suggest that although flood risk governance has been significantly strengthened, three gaps exist: First, a lack of a comprehensive plan for Mumbai that anticipates future risks and vulnerabilities and integrates CCA and DRR down to local level. Second, a lack of an overarching and decentralized institutional framework across sectors and scales that recognizes the multiplicity of formal and informal actors. Third, the potential of civil society and informal actors for disaster risk management and adaptation planning has not been tapped into sufficiently. The paper argues that potential exists to reconceptualize flood risk governance in Mumbai by focusing on future risks and vulnerabilities and by recognizing the work of informal actors like emergent groups at local level.
Over recent decades, hydrosocial scholarship focusing on the plural, often contested relations of waters and societies has advanced significantly. This article reviews hydrosocial scholarship in three steps that are contextualized by geography's long-standing efforts to use water to ‘think geography’. The article begins by revisiting critiques of the hydrological cycle as circulating free of anthropogenic forces and wholly on the ‘nature’ side of the society/nature dualism. We consider how this critique shapes engagement with other fields where human–water relations are crucial, such as socio-hydrology and those focused on climate change. The article then examines the extension of hydrosocial scholarship from critiques of the hydrological cycle to its use in explaining social spaces, such as territory, urban processes and citizenship. Finally, we consider how hydrosocial scholarship from Black, Indigenous and anti-colonial praxis challenges epistemologies and ontologies that, even in their critiques, recentre Eurocentric notions of water.
Jakarta is widely lauded by global consultancies, technology giants and critical scholars as an increasingly important ‘smart’ city. One of the reasons for this is the attempted use by state, corporate and individual actors of smart technologies, discourses and practices to solve the urban challenges of flooding, traffic and waste management in the context of climate change and urbanisation. In this paper, we examine the efforts of the Jakarta Smart City programme and office to govern these challenges. Where smart cities are often described as offering speed and real‐time efficiency, we instead find that the technologies and practices mobilised by the Jakarta Smart City programme govern by projecting, delaying and hypothesising into the future. We describe these governance strategies and outline three of their key forms: keeping track of objects and people, calculating and projecting state savings, and mundane watching but not acting. Rather than facilitating exacting and real‐time policy responses to address these urban problems, these practices instead produce temporal relations of delay that push action further into the future. Building on existing research about futuring and anticipation, and the tempos and rhythms of smart cities, our contribution is to highlight slowness and delay as a key mode of governing.
For the past two decades, work across a range of fields, but particularly geography, has engaged ‘critical hydropolitics’ as a way to highlight not only the politics inherent in decisions about water, but also the foundational assumptions of more conventional hydropolitical analyses that tend to focus on conflicts and cooperation over water resources, with a heavy emphasis on ‘the state’ as the key actor and scale of analysis. In this article we review critical hydropolitical literature that focuses on transboundary rivers that descend from the eastern Tibetan Plateau, namely the Lancang‐Mekong, Yarlung Tsangpo‐Brahmaputra and Nu‐Salween river basins. We highlight five key and interrelated themes that have emerged in the literature to date ‐ the state, scale, infrastructure, knowledge and logics, and climate change ‐ and discuss how these provide useful tools for more fine‐grained analyses of power, control and contestation.
The state of Jharkhand suffers immensely from water-induced surface erosion causing loss of socio-economic Jumar watershed of Ranchi district, Jharkhand was selected for a study period of 2020 and 2021 to analyse climate change, seasonal change in quality of water and soil resources, hydro-geomorphometry and land cover land use (LULC) using GIS and multivariate statistics. The water quality analysis revealed the presence of higher content of presence of metals such as Ca, Mg, K, and Na, higher alkalinity, TDS, and turbidity in monsoon and post-monsoon months of 2021. The soil quality analysis showed that the region has excessive carbonate salts with dominant presence of metal such as calcium, magnesium and sodium, disturbing the soil structure and lowering its infiltration capacity, promoting nutrient deficiencies, and leading to possible metal contamination in few years. Lack of vegetation covers adds to surface erosion under high intensity rainfall (1685-2083mm). The correlation analysis was done seasonally for both soil and water quality revealing the strong influence of metal ions with pH, alkalinity, salinity, and TDS, showing a prominent silicate weathering and ion exchange process indicating prominent surface erosion in watershed. The PCA on water and soil quality data showed that salinity, TDS, Alkalinity, Hardness and EC are the principal components. The morphometric study showed that the Jumar watershed has rolling and slightly undulating terrain, with mild slope and dendritic stream pattern of 4th order stream. Low basin relief and drainage density, compactness constant (0.00192), Ruggedness number (0.0609), and basin relief ratio (0.00552) indicated the dominance of low stream orders (1st ) in the area pointing to low potential energy in surface flow. The hydrological indices indicated that the watershed is low risk of gully formation in lowlands. Through the application of other GIS based rainfall, LULC and spectral indices (NDMI, MSI, SAVI and BSI) it was found that there has been a huge increase in urbanization, barren land, sparse vegetation cover, and immense water stress especially in summer and winter season of 2020 and 2021 in the watershed. The Lack of water conservation and traditional agriculture using agrochemicals is very prominent in the watershed, hence an immediate need for water and soil quality management is required.
Heavy metal pollution in the water resources has been a global ecological issue. Heavy metal is present in water bodies due to natural and anthropogenic processes. In this review, the purpose was to see the effect of heavy metal contamination due to anthropogenic sources on water resources. The increased influx of heavy metals is attributed mostly due to anthropogenic activity like agriculture, industries, commercial and domestic activity, especially in Asian countries. Heavy metals enter the water bodies through surface runoff, sewage, effluent discharge, mine drains, etc. The increased toxicity results in various adverse effects like loss of microbial and aquatic biomes, chlorosis, hinder germination and growth, cause low biomass formation, affect the process of photosynthesis, decrease nutrient absorption, generate free radicals that harm the membranes and weaken the cell structure in aquatic plants. In human beings, heavy metal toxicity causes neurological disorders nervous system damage, multiple organ damage, Alzheimer’s disease, cancer etc. Human bodies need some trace metals (copper, zinc, iron) for intracellular and DNA-binding processes. Most of these metals are toxic even in trace amount and are carcinogenic. Heavy metal-induced carcinogenesis inhibits DNA repair and it’s cross-linking with proteins because of the formation of reactive oxygen species, leading to oxidative stress in the cells and tissues. The application of heavy metals in production and manufacturing has increased exponentially in the past few decades which have indirectly increased human exposure to these metals. Heavy metal and metalloids are non-biodegradable and tend to bioaccumulate and bio-magnify in the food chain. Thus, they cause serious health issues for end consumers. Hence, it is crucial to understand the sources of these metal contaminants to conserve water resources. There is an urgent need to control the metal toxicity in water resources and apply advanced techniques for remediation.
The artificial intelligence (AI) fast growth and its broad impact on various sectors need an evaluation of its effect on the accomplishment of the sustainable development goals (SDGs). AI is the biggest influence on the global economy. AI plays a very important role in achieving environmental sustainability—from ending hunger and poverty to achieving sustainable energy and gender equality for the protection and preservation of biodiversity. The SDGs are divided into three categories namely society, economy, and environment. This division allows us to come up with an overview of the general impact areas of AI. AI finds application in a wide array of environmental sectors, which include natural resource conservation, energy management, wildlife protection, pollution control and agriculture, clean energy, and waste management. AI will support energy systems having low carbon footprint with more energy efficiency, which are required to address climate change. AI can help in managing the complex ecosystem structure and functions effectively. Apart from above-mentioned applications it can also help in identifying desertification trends over large areas, in decision-making and environmental planning. Due to advent of many new technologies, AI can be now implemented in those countries which are having different cultural values and wealth. This has popularized the method all over the world. Advanced AI-based product design, technology, and research may require vast computational resources which can be made available through enormous computing centers. Such facilities require huge energy requirement and have massive carbon footprint. AI-based ecosystem information may cause exploitation of resources, although this kind of misuse has not been reported adequately. The AI development needs to be supported and guarded by the requisite regulatory body. The oversight will result in gaps in safety, transparency, and ethical standards. Today's need is to develop AI which is more eco-friendly not only today but for generations to come.
Mumbai’s storm water drainage system is rapidly transforming as incidences of heavy rainfall rise. Its transformation is built on the idea of conserving the city’s ‘rivers’ that were lost to urban development. While this move to recuperate a heritage of rivers seems like a step in the right direction, Mumbai’s drainage system was largely cobbled together over time through piecemeal interventions in an estuarine landscape. This article shows how by engineering a history of rivers, the city’s planning authorities set in motion an agenda to train the expansive estuarine and improvisational systems into governable riverine channels contained within the state’s developmental visions. It focuses on one major channel, the Mithi, to show how the rationality of disaster preparedness, the emergent calculus of carrying capacities, as well as infrastructure are braided into constructed ecological histories to inscribe a new hydrological order on the city. For Mumbai’s engineers, these changes introduce new scalar logics and alter the nature of the drainage assemblage. Mithi’s transformation is emblematic of how articulations of nature, technology and urban development are emerging from the anxieties of climate change.
Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital, is increasingly characterized by luxury real estate developments and high-profile infrastructural projects made possible by economic liberalization and finance capital. Yet these developments have contributed to Jakarta’s struggles with chronic flooding, land subsidence, and water shortages. This paper contributes an empirical study of the spatial-temporal dynamics of speculative urbanism and the associated impacts on water resources and flood events in Jakarta. I use an urban political ecology approach to analyze mainland and offshore development. First, I show how financial speculation generates flood risk and the overexploitation of water resources, producing uneven socio-spatial distributions of risk. These transformations in Jakarta’s hydroscape in turn threaten to undermine the city’s viability as a site for speculative investment. I thus show how speculative urbanism can be threatened or disrupted by nonhuman agencies. Second, I illustrate a second form of speculation, which I refer to as environmental speculation. As Jakarta’s water crisis has cast doubt on the future of the city itself as a place of habitation, the state explored an ambitious and potentially lucrative coastal defense project, while private developers have engaged in land reclamation. The turn toward offshore development illustrates how environmental speculation creates new opportunities for capital accumulation. I advance two arguments: first, in order to capture the full costs of speculative urbanism, it is imperative that urban scholars attend to its ecological dimensions. Second, an urban political ecology approach advances our understandings of speculative urbanism by illuminating its contradictions and limits.
Majority lower-income and working-class districts in the Global South have long relied on an intricate interweaving of diverse practices. This has been complemented by strategic engagements with the ambiguities inherent in governing the dispositions of land and municipal services. These processes of majority-inflected urbanization are being substantially constrained both by the restructuring of urban rule and economy and by the exigencies of climate change. At the same time, there are often undue expectations that grassroots movements will be critical drivers of urban transformations capable of enduring climate change. But the collective actions of many low-income districts are seemingly indifferent to such expectations. Both the endurance of long-honed political practices and their substantive adjustments are explored here in order to revisit fundamental questions about how to generate lives worth living without valorization of the human.
Aiming at the problems of high-energy consumption, high pollution and high emission in the process of urban landscape–waterscape construction, the importance of water resources recycling is analyzed. This paper discusses the function and necessity of urban landscape–waterscape construction, integrates the mode of urban water resources recycling in three aspects: recycling of domestic sewage, recycling of domestic sewage and recycling of industrial sewage, sets up multi-sensors, analyzes the construction process step by step, constructs a virtual simulation map of water landscape, and takes low-energy consumption, low pollution and low emission as the verification indicators to realize the importance analysis of the effect of water resources recycling on urban landscape construction. The analysis results show that after the application of the mode of water resources recycling, the effect of low-energy consumption is ensured, the coefficient of low pollution is high, and the standard of low emission is met. It can be applied to the actual urban landscape–waterscape construction process.
Hydraulic City explores the politics of Mumbai's water infrastructure to demonstrate how citizenship emerges through the continuous efforts to control, maintain, and manage the city's water. The book demonstrates how Mumbai's water flows, not through a static collection of pipes and valves, but through a dynamic infrastructure built on the relations between residents, plumbers, politicians, engineers, and the 3,000 miles of pipe that bind them. In addition to distributing water, the public water network often reinforces social identities and the exclusion of marginalized groups, as only those actively recognized by city agencies receive legitimate water services. This form of recognition—what Anand calls "hydraulic citizenship"—is incremental, intermittent, and reversible. It provides residents an important access point through which they can make demands on the state for other public services such as sanitation and education. Tying the ways Mumbai's poorer residents are seen by the state to their historic, political, and material relations with water pipes, the book highlights the critical role infrastructures play in consolidating civic and social belonging in the city.
Cities on a Finite Planet: Transformative responses to climate change shows how cities can combine high quality living conditions, resilience to climate change, disaster risk reduction and contributions to mitigation/low carbon development. It also covers the current and potential contribution of cities to avoiding dangerous climate change and is the first book with an in-depth coverage of how cities and their governments, citizens and civil society organizations can combine these different agendas, based on careful city-level analyses. The foundation for the book is detailed city case studies on Bangalore, Bangkok, Dar es Salaam, Durban, London, Manizales, Mexico City, New York and Rosario. Each of these was led by authors who contributed to the IPCC's Fifth Assessment and are thus acknowledged as among the world's top specialists in this field. This book highlights where there is innovation and progress in cities and how this was achieved. Also where there is little progress and no action and where there is no capacity to act. It also assesses the extent to which cities can address the Sustainable Development Goals within commitments to also dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In this, it highlights how much progress on these different agendas depends on local governments and their capacities to work with their low-income populations. © 2016 selection and editorial matter, Sheridan Bartlett and David Satterthwaite. All rights reserved.
Water lies at the intersection of landscape and infrastructure, crossing between visible and invisible domains of urban space, in the tanks and buckets of the global South and the vast subterranean technological networks of the global North. In this book, Matthew Gandy considers the cultural and material significance of water through the experiences of six cities: Paris, Berlin, Lagos, Mumbai, Los Angeles, and London. Tracing the evolving relationships among modernity, nature, and the urban imagination, from different vantage points and through different periods, Gandy uses water as a lens through which to observe both the ambiguities and the limits of nature as conventionally understood. Gandy begins with the Parisian sewers of the nineteenth century, captured in the photographs of Nadar, and the reconstruction of subterranean Paris. He moves on to Weimar-era Berlin and its protection of public access to lakes for swimming, the culmination of efforts to reconnect the city with nature. He considers the threat of malaria in Lagos, where changing geopolitical circumstances led to large-scale swamp drainage in the 1940s. He shows how the dysfunctional water infrastructure of Mumbai offers a vivid expression of persistent social inequality in a postcolonial city. He explores the incongruous concrete landscapes of the Los Angeles River. Finally, Gandy uses the fictional scenario of a partially submerged London as the starting point for an investigation of the actual hydrological threats facing that city.
This article revisits the notion of radical planning from the standpoint of the global South. Emerging struggles for citizenship in the global South, seasoned by the complexities of state—citizen relations within colonial and post-colonial regimes, offer an historicized view indispensable to counter-hegemonic planning practices. The article articulates the notion of insurgent planning as radical planning practices that respond to neoliberal specifics of dominance through inclusion — that is, inclusive governance. It characterizes the guiding principles for insurgent planning practices as counter-hegemonic, transgressive and imaginative. The article contributes to two current conversations within planning scholarship: on the implication of grassroots insurgent citizenship for planning, and on (de)colonization of planning theory.
Typically, cities and nature are perceived as geographic opposites, cities being manufactured social creations, and nature being outside of human construction. Through a historical geography of water in the modern city, Kaika shows that this is not the case. Rather, nature and the modern city are fully intertwined, with cities integrating nature at every level of activity. While her empirical focus is on Athens, she discusses other major cities in the West, including London and New York.
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In the late 1970s the Government of Indonesia initiated a series of planning studies focusing on the environmental deterioration of the Jakarta metropolitan region. The central feature of the resulting spatial development plans has been to guide urban-industrial development out of DKI Jakarta toward a select number of growth centres and inter-urban corridors, but they have not been accompanied by sufficient attention to the institutional obstacles. These are the absence of effective coordination between government bureaux charged with various aspects of land use management; the absence of sufficient incentives to guide private land development away from environmentally sensitive areas; and the absence of consistent political will to implement existing regulations. -from Author
Jakarta has entered an era of chronic flooding that is annually affecting tens of thousands of people, most of whom are crowded into low-income neighbourhoods in flood-prone areas of the city. As the greater Jakarta mega-urban region—Jabodetabek—approaches the 30 million population mark and the sources of flooding become ever more complex through combinations of global climate change and human transformations of the urban landscape, government responses to flooding pursued primarily through canal improvements fall further behind rising flood risks. Years of field observation and archival and ethnographic research are brought together in a political ecology framework to answer key questions concerning how government responses to flooding continue without significant participation of affected residents, who are being compelled to relocate when floods occur. How do urban development processes in Jakarta contribute to chronic flooding? How does flooding arise from and further generate compound disasters that cascade through Jakarta's expanding mega-urban region? What is the potential for neighbourhoods and communities to collaboratively respond through socially and environmentally meaningful initiatives and activities to address chronic flooding? Floods, urban land use changes, spatial marginalization, and community mobilization open new political dynamics and possibilities for addressing floods in ways that also assist neighbourhoods in gaining resilience. The urgency of floods as problems to be solved is often interpreted as a need for immediate solutions related only to flood management, but community resilience is more crucially attained in non-emergency times by expanding rights to dwell in this city, build houses, and create vernacular communities, livelihoods, and social support networks.
In this article I explore the political and technical controversies of measuring water leakages in Mumbai to demonstrate how the dense historical accretions of technology, material, and social life that form hydraulic infrastructures in Mumbai trouble the audit cultures of neoliberal government. While scholars have recently drawn attention to the generativity of ignorance in the making of the state, in this article I argue that ignorance is not only a technology of politics, produced and managed by municipal water engineers and their subjects. Leakages, and the ignorances of leakages, are also enabled by the vital materiality of the city’s infrastructure. As engineers work hard to improvise resolutions to the leakages they can fix, and ignore the thousands of others they cannot, the processes of leakage always exceed the control of the city’s government. As such, the uncertain appearances of leakage in Mumbai not only provide the grounds for the work of the state. Leakages also constantly disrupt governmental projects in ways that make the water department vulnerable both to the claims of marginalized subjects and to new reform projects in the city.
Green infrastructure projects are increasing in popularity, in part because of the range of benefits they can provide. However, certain benefits such as water quality improvements and climate risk mitigation are more easily integrated into planning decisions than the less tangible cultural ecosystem services that green infrastructure can provide. While methods exist to characterize the value of these cultural services, there are methodological challenges to obtaining this information and fitting it to a decision context, particularly when weighed against monetary costs and benefits. In a developing country context, these challenges can be magnified and thus the value of cultural services are seldom considered. We illustrate this through a case study of a river in Jakarta, Indonesia, where plans call for widening the river channel, stabilizing the banks with concrete, and restricting access to the river. We employ a mixed-method approach of household surveys, a discrete choice experiment and ethnographic interviews, to ascertain historical and present uses of the river, and residents' preferences for future changes to the river. We demonstrate that low-income residents value non- or indirect-use cultural services that the river corridor provides—services that would be lost under the current rehabilitation plan. By assessing residents’ willingness to pay for cultural services, we can more easily compare these scenarios to the current plan. We also show how our mixed-methods approach to valuation can help frame and interpret quantitative results, so that decision makers have additional contextual information that reflects the knowledge and aspirations of communities most impacted by the rehabilitation project. We demonstrate that such approaches are feasible and sometimes necessary in complex, data-poor urban environments.
It has been over 15 years since the term 'urban political ecology' (UPE) was coined. While still often not incorporated into larger discussion of political ecology, its growing visibility in the published literature suggests that it has gone beyond an emerging theoretical lens to one that has fully emerged. This report characterizes the current literature that explicitly utilizes the language of UPE, discusses its theoretical evolution that is now seeing a second wave, as well as catalogs some of the new arenas through which the sub-field has offered novel insights into the socionatural unevenness of cities. A central contribution of this survey is to illustrate the myriad articulations of how urban environmental and social change co-determine each other and how these metabolic processes offer insights into creative pathways toward more democratic urban environmental politics.
This book explores the formation of populist urban programs in post-Suharto Jakarta and the cultural and political contradictions that have arisen as a result of the continuing influence of the Suharto-era's neoliberal ideology of development. Analyzing a spectrum of urban agendas from waterfront city to green environment and housing for the poor, the book deepens our understanding of the spatial mediation of power, the interaction between elite and populist urban imaginings, and how past ideologies are integral to the present even as they are newly reconfigured. The book examines the anxiety over the destiny of Jakarta in its efforts to resolve the crisis of the city. The first group of chapters consider the fate and fortune of two building types, namely the city hall and the shop house, over a longue duree as a metonymy for the culture, politics, and society of the city and the nation. Other chapters focus on the intellectual legacies of the Sukarno and Suharto eras and the influence of their spatial paradigms. The final three chapters look at social and ecological consciousness in the post-Suharto era.
As climate change threats to urban centres become more alarming, cities are proposing ambitious plans to adapt to climate impacts. These plans are increasingly subsumed within urban development projects, and embedded in global flows of capital and networks of environmental governance and planning. And yet, scholarship on urban adaptation has tended to approach the city as an analytically bounded territory, neglecting interconnections across space and processes of globalisation, urbanisation, and geopolitics. This paper extends theories of relational geographies to explore the emerging conditions of urban adaptation in the context of climate change and globalised urban development. Focusing on the global links of Dutch water expertise, and tracing relationships within and between Rotterdam, New York, and Jakarta, it illustrates the formation of global-urban networks – the multiscalar, multilevel connections through which capital, knowledge, and influence flow. It probes the ways in which these networks emerge to mobilise ideas and influence across geographical scales and political boundaries, driven and defined by interrelated factors including economic relationships, historically defined situational relationships, and interface conditions including narratives of culture and environmental urgency. The paper introduces the concept of ‘network formation’ to see and understand such interconnected, relational processes. It explains the spatial and temporal interconnections within and across sites, and the relationships between urban spatial projects and broader political economies and ecologies. The paper asserts the importance of conceptualising the relationships and interfaces of increasingly mobile and interconnected urban environmental futures.
This title implies a discussion of the relation of regional planning to ecology, and of the problems going with such relation.
A study of water at the intersection of landscape and infrastructure in Paris, Berlin, Lagos, Mumbai, Los Angeles, and London.
Water lies at the intersection of landscape and infrastructure, crossing between visible and invisible domains of urban space, in the tanks and buckets of the global South and the vast subterranean technological networks of the global North. In this book, Matthew Gandy considers the cultural and material significance of water through the experiences of six cities: Paris, Berlin, Lagos, Mumbai, Los Angeles, and London. Tracing the evolving relationships among modernity, nature, and the urban imagination, from different vantage points and through different periods, Gandy uses water as a lens through which to observe both the ambiguities and the limits of nature as conventionally understood.
Gandy begins with the Parisian sewers of the nineteenth century, captured in the photographs of Nadar, and the reconstruction of subterranean Paris. He moves on to Weimar-era Berlin and its protection of public access to lakes for swimming, the culmination of efforts to reconnect the city with nature. He considers the threat of malaria in Lagos, where changing geopolitical circumstances led to large-scale swamp drainage in the 1940s. He shows how the dysfunctional water infrastructure of Mumbai offers a vivid expression of persistent social inequality in a postcolonial city. He explores the incongruous concrete landscapes of the Los Angeles River. Finally, Gandy uses the fictional scenario of a partially submerged London as the starting point for an investigation of the actual hydrological threats facing that city.
After the New Order follows up Abidin Kusno’s well-received Behind the Postcolonial and The Appearances of Memory. This new work explores the formation of populist urban programs in post-Suharto Jakarta and the cultural and political contradictions that have arisen as a result of the continuing influence of the Suharto-era’s neoliberal ideology of development. Analyzing a spectrum of urban agendas from waterfront city to green environment and housing for the poor, Kusno deepens our understanding of the spatial mediation of power, the interaction between elite and populist urban imaginings, and how past ideologies are integral to the present even as they are newly reconfigured. The book brings together eight chapters that examine the anxiety over the destiny of Jakarta in its efforts to resolve the crisis of the city. In the first group of chapters Kusno considers the fate and fortune of two building types, namely the city hall and the shop house, over a longue duree as a metonymy for the culture, politics, and society of the city and the nation. Other chapters focus on the intellectual legacies of the Sukarno and Suharto eras and the influence of their spatial paradigms. The final three chapters look at social and ecological consciousness in the post-Suharto era. One reflects on citizens’ responses to the waterfront city project, another on the efforts to “green” the city as it is overrun by capitalism and reaching its ecological limits. The third discusses a recent low-income housing program by exploring the two central issues of land and financing; it illuminates the interaction between the politics of urban space and that of global financial capitalism. The epilogue, consisting of an interview with the author, discusses Kusno’s writings on contemporary Jakarta, his approach to history, and how his work is shaped by concerns over the injustices, violence, and environmental degradation that continue to accompany the city’s democratic transition. After the New Order will be essential reading for anyone—including Asianists, urban historians, social scientists, architects, and planners—concerned with the interplay of space, power, and identity.
Purpose – Many cities are located in coastal areas and many of them are identified as prone to climate change impacts, especially sea level rise and floods. Master plans of cities can feature responses to these challenges, as in the case of Jakarta's master plan 2010–2030. However, as this chapter will argue, the top-down nature of planning would likely produce, reproduce, or reaffirm unjust urban geographies in the name of climate change adaptation. North Jakarta and its coastal area, which were prone to climate change risks, has been home for more than 40,000 poor households, most of which live in houses less than 50m2 in informal settlements with lack of basic needs infrastructures. This chapter addresses the question, “How are poor communities in the north coast of Jakarta affected by extreme weather events, and how are their everyday experiences addressed in master plan Jakarta 2010–2030?”
Methodology/approach – Analysis is based on community profiles, census information, and a workshop with representatives of these communities. This chapter will also analyze relevant parts of Jakarta's 2010–2030 master plan. The discussion covers the following: (1) the making of place-based communities of the urban poor in the north coast of Jakarta compared to the master plan, and (2) the impact of climate change on the urban poor's livelihoods in the north coast.
Findings – The current master plan 2010–2030 features plans to mitigate climate change and environmental risks for the coastal area, especially sea level rise, land subsidence, and pollution. The study reveals that North Jakarta communities were unaware of what the city planners have drafted, but most of them realized climate challenges based on their everyday experience. They aspired to be involved in the planning process, but their informal status hampered their opportunity to be heard.
Originality/value of chapter – Rather than looking at how Jakarta as a city is affected by climate change, this chapter focuses on specific communities in North Jakarta that are prone to climate change-induced risks. Climate change impacts are spatially unequal, and even in the same region that theoretically bears the same risks, the impact distribution of climate change can be unequal for different social groups. The chapter also questions the ability of urban planning to respond to these challenges when planning practice itself has not yet taken into account citizens’ social awareness and participation meaningfully.
In this book, the first on the planning history of Jarkarta, able expert Christopher Silver describes how planning has shaped urban development in Southeast Asia, and in particular how its largest city, Jakarta, Indonesia, was transformed from a colonial capital of approximately 150,000 in 1900 to a megacity of 12-13 million inhabitants in 2000. Placing the city's planning history within local, national and international contexts, exploring not only the formal planning actions, but how planning was shaped by broader political, economic, social and cultural factors in Indonesia's development, this book is an excellent resource for academics, students and professionals involved in urban planning, history and geography as well as other interested parties.
Dense, self-built settlements along riverbanks within Asian cities are often excluded from the planning realm, which ensures governments lack knowledge of how particular communities function. The magnitude of land area and population, dynamic local economies, organic policy making processes, and scarcity and consistency of data challenge research on flood impacts and possible solutions in Asian cities. Resultantly, a deeper understanding of alternative and more dynamic forms of environmental management is necessary. The focus of this paper is to analyze the usefulness and challenges of participatory mapping in relation to urban floods, particularly community mapping and crowd-sourced mapping. This analysis is based on the assumption of participatory mapping discourse that participatory mapping increases communities' negotiation power to improve their livelihood. This paper employs participant observation and ethnographic interviews within the Ciliwung River corridor in Jakarta. Specifically it focuses on activists and residents in river communities in relation to participatory community mapping exercises conducted since 2012 and a new crowd-sourced flood mapping system launched in December 2014. Participatory community mapping and crowd-sourced flood mapping, as two forms of community-based mapping approaches to floods, are viewed as potential tools to overcome urban flood hazards while raising disaster awareness among city residents. Community mapping is a method of visualizing a neighborhood's communal memories and embedded power relations, while a crowd-sourced flood map visualizes vulnerabilities and may become a tool for information sharing for the betterment of the spatially and socially fragmented city.
Landscape visualisation and modelling has progressively merged over the last decade providing ever increasing accuracy and realism. As powerful as visualised landscapes may be, there is a need to integrate them with numerical models to simulate real world dynamics, and by doing so, move beyond a purely visual evocative expression to one which is physically grounded in reality. In this paper, we present an approach that integrates landscape and hydrodynamic modelling through the modification and testing of point cloud data to assess the flooding of the Ciliwung River in Jakarta, Indonesia. We propose a series of 6 scenarios along the 40 km course of the river corridor ranging from the governments’ “normalisation” proposal to a green infrastructure scenario by our team. Through such flood simulations we have found that the severity of the floods can only be contained by implementing the extensive normalised canal that is planned, however, the scale of the intervention at hand and the possible impacts further downstream need to be carefully weighed in. Likewise, while the green infrastructure scenario can be seen as a possible alternative to flood management, it is unlikely to mitigate the effects of the most severe of floods. In reality, a careful combination of the two extreme scenarios of a new concrete channel and a green corridor will likely provide the best balance between flood mitigation and riparian restoration. The integrated modelling approach presented here provides a possible platform to further refine such a scenario into one which best caters to all stakeholders in the Bogor, Depok and Jakarta regions.
As urban environments transform across the globe, debates over urban nature and its future forms have introduced important critical questions. How, for instance, do we study emergent, dynamic configurations of nature and culture in cities? How do we conceptualize the city as a field site when urbanization encompasses the full spatial continuum from city to countryside? How do we understand the place of history in an environmental era often categorized as unprecedented? This article traces political ecology from its noncity origins to its present engagements with urban life and forms. It argues that ethnographic work both enriches and complicates recent debates about the urban past, present, and future, and it calls for more vigorous and refined anthropological engagement with the biophysical sciences, the theoretical and methodological challenges of scale, and the work of historical contextualization in the history-evasive era now widely known as the Anthropocene.
This article asks methodological questions about studying infrastructure with some of the tools and perspectives of ethnography. infrastructure is both relational and ecological-it means different things to different groups and it is part of the balance of action tools, and the built environment, inseparable from them. It also is frequently mundane to the point of boredom, involving things such as plugs, standards, and bureaucratic forms. Some of the difficulties of studying infrastructure are how to scale up from traditional ethnographic sites, how to manage large quantities of data such as those produced by transaction logs and how to understand the interplay of online and offline behavior: Some of the tricks of the trade involved in meeting these challenges include studying the design of infrastructure, understanding the paradoxes of infrastructure as both transparent and opaque, including invisible work in the ecological analysis, and pinpointing the epistemological status of indictors.
In The Landscape Urbanism Reader Charles Waldheim—who is at the forefront of this new movement—has assembled the definitive collection of essays by many of the field's top practitioners. Fourteen essays written by leading figures across a range of disciplines and from around the world—including James Corner, Linda Pollak, Alan Berger, Pierre Bolanger, Julia Czerniak, and more—capture the origins, the contemporary milieu, and the aspirations of this relatively new field. The Landscape Urbanism Reader is an inspiring signal to the future of city making as well as an indispensable reference for students, teachers, architects, and urban planners.
This paper presents a historical analysis of the evolution of the World Bank's policies on urban water supply networks, from 1960 to the late 1980s. The analysis frames urban water supply as an attempt (contested and incomplete) to extend the biopolitical power of developmental states. I argue that the World Bank's agenda was predicated on a set of contradictions (and an untenable public/private binary) that contributed to the emergence of 'state failure' arguments by the late 1980s. This perspective enables critical reflection on the historical origins of the concept of 'state failure', and on contemporary debates over urbanization, infrastructure, and development.
Infrastructures are material forms that allow for the possibility of exchange over space. They are the physical networks through which goods, ideas, waste, power, people, and finance are trafficked. In this article I trace the range of anthropological literature that seeks to theorize infrastructure by drawing on biopolitics, science and technology studies, and theories of technopolitics. I also examine other dimensions of infrastructures that release different meanings and structure politics in various ways: through the aesthetic and the sensorial, desire and promise.
Asian urbanization is entering a new phase that differs significantly from the patterns of city growth experienced in other developing countries and in the developed world. According to a recent hypothesis, zones of intensive economic interaction between rural and urban activities are emerging. The zones appear to be a new form of socioeconomic organization that is neither rural nor urban, but preserves essential ingredients of each. The landscapes in these extended metropolitan zones have changed little over decades. Most people live in villages, and almost all of the land is under cultivation. However, most income now comes from non-agricultural sources. Village and small-town industries provide employment for some family members, who help out in the fields only at planting or harvesting time. Others commute to jobs in the central cities. Still others live in the cities and their satellites, remitting portions of their salaries to the family. This study elaborates on this hypothesis through studies of urban areas in China, India, Indonesia and Japan. Contributors offer different perspectives from a variety of disciplines including geography, regional planning, sociology, economics and public administration. All seek to determine how rapidly, under what circumstances, and on what scale the extended metropolis is emerging.
Contrary to what one would expect from the term "landscape architecture," the domain of landscape design does not end at the waterline. The discipline of landscape design can and should play a pivotal role in the restoration of critical marine habitat. As Superstorm Sandy made devastatingly evident in October 2012, the boundary between land and water has become increasingly difficult to define. Landscape design can function as a bridge between these two seemingly distinct domains. Landscape design is also able to provide visualization of underwater conditions through maps and above-water structures, and connect concepts of public realm improvements to the science and regulatory contexts of marine environments. In doing so, the landscape architecture profession is able to facilitate public engagement and educational awareness of restoration projects and place these projects in a cultural context, which may prove to be a key element behind their ultimate long-term success.
In particular, landscape design can play a role in the restoration of shellfish habitat in the New York Harbor. Eastern oysters (Crassostrea virginica ) and ribbed mussels (Geukensia demissa ) provide numerous ecosystem services. Both species of bivalves are filter feeders and can improve water quality by facilitating the removal of excess nitrogen and other pollutants from the water column. A single oyster can filter up to 50 gallons of water per day (NY/NJ Baykeeper, pers. comm.). Oysters are a keystone species in the ecosystem, and reefs in particular increase the availability of habitat for a wide array of marine organisms by providing spatially complex substrate and mosaic-like topography. They also can function as wave attenuators, thereby helping to mitigate the effects of storm surges (New York-New Jersey Harbor Estuary Program 2009). The ecological benefits of ribbed mussels mirror those of oysters and because of their higher tolerance to pollutants, it is more feasible at the present time to focus on the restoration of mussels, which are already plentiful around the harbor. Furthermore, oysters are a desirable food source for humans. Coined by some as an "attractive nuisance," concerns have been raised about human consumption due to possible accumulation of harmful toxins. Heavy metals still present from the manufacturing history in New York and New Jersey would be incorporated into the oyster tissue. It should be noted that State of Maryland, however, has active partnerships between the oyster industry and restoration advocates, and the issue of "attractive nuisance" has not impeded active shell and seed planting efforts throughout the Chesapeake Bay. Maryland, which invested more than $50 million in oyster recovery (Fears 2013), may serve as a model for other states interested in restoring oysters for economic and ecological purposes.
Rendering of Oyster-tecture at the Bay Ridge Flats, a shallow area out in the Gowanus Bay, New York with downtown Manhattan in the background . Image credit: SCAPE LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE PLLC.
There are already several planning initiatives in the New York / New Jersey Harbor related to shellfish restoration, and a series of pilot projects that aim to test the feasibility of returning shellfish to the much-altered harbor ecology. The Oyster Restoration Research Project (ORRP) had five pilot reefs at sites around the New York Harbor with different environmental conditions, and they are now focusing their efforts on the Soundview reef in the Bronx (Grizzle et al. 2013). The experimental reefs were made out of a rock base covered with a mollusk shell veneer. These reefs were then seeded with Spat on Shell and monitored to assess both the survival of the oysters and the ecosystem services they provide. In addition to the Soundview reef, reefs off Governors Island and Hastings-on-Hudson showed promising results, and were all reseeded with spat. The reefs at Bay Ridge Flats, Brooklyn, and Staten Island were not reseeded because both were located in dynamic systems and were covered with sedimentation. Moving forward, ORRP aims to increase reef size and develop mechanisms to limit erosion and transport of spat off of the reefs (Grizzle et al. 2013).
Model of the variety of human uses of Oyster-tecture . Image credit: SCAPE LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE PLLC.
These pilot reefs can be compared to the restoration...
It is increasingly clear that the world of climate politics is no longer confined to the activities of national governments and international negotiations. Critical to this transformation of the politics of climate change has been the emergence of new forms of transnational governance that cut across traditional state-based jurisdictions and operate across public and private divides. This book provides the first comprehensive, cutting-edge account of the world of transnational climate change governance. Co-authored by a team of the world's leading experts in the field and based on a survey of sixty case studies, the book traces the emergence, nature and consequences of this phenomenon, and assesses the implications for the field of global environmental politics. It will prove invaluable for researchers, graduate students and policy makers in climate change, political science, international relations, human geography, sociology and ecological economics.
Provides the first comprehensive account of transnational climate change governance
Offers three different conceptual lenses through which to examine these issues
Will appeal to those seeking to understand the potential and limits of alternative responses to climate change
In our 2005 paper, Rethinking Sustainable Cities, we made a case for the increasing significance of climate change in the urban politics of sustainability. Taking a multilevel governance perspective, we argued that the ‘urban’ governance of climate protection was not confined to a local arena or to the actions of the state, but rather was orchestrated through the interrelations between global, national and local actors across state/non-state boundaries. We revisit these arguments and examine their validity in the light of the rapidly changing landscape of urban responses to climate change and the growing academic literature in this field. We consider in turn: the ways in which climate change is shaping urban agendas; the utility of multilevel governance perspectives for understanding this phenomenon; and the extent to which we can identify a ‘new’ politics of urban climate change governance and its consequent implications for the development of theory and practice in this field.