Urban Seas: Infrastructure, Uncertainty and Climate Change
What are urban seas made of? And how might those working in urban seas provide new modes and idioms for living in cities with sea level rise? This project provincializes the grounds of urban planning and urban theory by attending to the ways in which fishers living in the city in the sea are already organizing their livelihoods and social worlds with anthropogenic climate change and coastal pollution. Their changing practices may reveal new ways to live in cities in the sea in the future.
Project Note
This recently completed book manuscript by Nikhil Anand, focuses on the work of fishers, scientists and city planners as they work to understand, inhabit and settle the turbid relationships of the city in the sea. Most of the ethnographic research of Urban Sea was gathered between June 2018 and August 2019. Owing to a series of transportation infrastructure projects being staged in the sea during this time, the relationships between urban government, citizen scientists, fishers, environmental activists, and concerned citizens were (and continue to be) especially fraught.
In the book, Anand shows how the Urban Sea is a deeply contested, amphibious space. First, the municipal government continues to colonize the edges of the terrestrial city, filling these regions with the profits and prerogatives of real estate. Next, fishers negotiate the dynamic qualities of the sea even as it is increasingly made of warmer waters, concrete, sewage and more unpredictable ecologies. Finally, amidst the restive monsoons and seas of climate change, storm water engineers are increasingly concerned that their massive infrastructures, can only be as tenuous and impermanent as the urban sea in which they are staged. Urban Seas explores the possibilities and meanings with which social, technical and environmental futures are being made in the coastal city after the infrastructures that separate land and water collapse with climate change.
Research Affiliates
Nikhil Anand
