To conclude the BlueUrban project, artec Sustainability Research Center, together with the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT) and the Center for Strategic and Global Studies of the Universitas Indonesia, is organising an international conference in Jakarta, Indonesia, which you can also attend online.

You are cordially invited to participate in the conference online!

11.-13.09.2023

Between „Blue Urbanism“ and Tanah Air: Urban Experiments, Circulations, and Placemaking as Sea Level Change Adaptation

Online participation via Zoom
Zoom meeting ID: 821 4423 3114 (passcode: iccsgs)

Please find here the programme and the website of the conference.
Please note the time difference of currently 5 hours ahead of CET.

Keynote Speakers
Prof Dr.-Ing. Wiwandra Handayani
Dept. of Urban & regional Planning, Diponegoro University (UNDIP)

Guntoro, SH
Urban kampung activist and legal advocate, urban Poor Consortium, Jakarta

Assistant Prof Dr Chitra Venkataramani
Department of Anthropoly and Sociology, National University of Singapore (NUS)

Panels & Parallel Sessions
i. Unlearning – troubling past and contemporary meanings, sensibilities and practices in urban coastal spaces
ii. Dreaming – exploring urban dreamscapes; envisioning transformative change and alternative futurities
iii. Remaking – co-thinking challenges in coastal placemaking, the politics of sea level solutionism, forms of co-production and “planning from below”

Why experiments at placemaking along the urban coast?
Coastal cities around the world are among the fastest growing urban spaces. While a greater proportion of the world´s megacities are situated along seacoasts, they remain doubly precarious to both the effects of slow-creep sea level change, and localised socio-environmental dynamics such as land subsidence and liquefaction that remain intrinsically political. 

Global coastal cities are also sites of markedly visible forms of social inequality and inequity, as urban shorelines continue to be overbuilt, privatised and gentrified, while continuously fragmenting spaces of unplanned urbanization and pushing the urban littoral poor further hinterland.

The connected diverse forms of coastal geo-engineering and placemaking weave together antithetical imaginaries of urban coastal futurities– some that embrace protective living away from water through the armouring of land-sea interfaces (through dykes and seawalls for example), while other rationalities embrace more amphibious forms of infrastructural production along seashores and over water.  

Taken together, these epistemologies and their relational entanglements bring to question new kinds of urbanism – one in which the city and sea are techno-scientifically and politically integrated, often within (and against) marked-led logics of late capitalism. These interventions often re-configure not only temporalities and spatio-technical fabrics of cities, but also reshape nature-cultures and manifold forms of cohabitation with more-than-human life.  

This transdisciplinary conference therefore sets out to explore these differentiated, polarising dynamics inherent in coastal cities, many of which have turned towards “blue urban solutionism” – whether in terms of deriving socio-economic value from the sea (e.g., via the Blue Economy), or more radically in terms of re-envisioning shored, urban life in highly protected terrestrial spaces or out at sea. Some of these approaches remain managerial and technocratic, while others may seek to challenge current exploitative and extractive models of socio-ecological transition in their wake.   

While cities turn to the sea, we also place as much emphasis on the un/rethinking of urbanizing/urbanized islands and urban centres in archipelagic contexts (or ´archipelagicities´). What sensibilities of amphibious and protective living with/away from water are foregrounded in these urban experiments? How do contemporary and evolving urban infrastructures, from the material and symbolic to the digital, reproduce and contest historic and new dynamics of urban coastal change?

In contemplating these antithetical realities, we draw inspiration from the Indonesian vernacular "Tanah Air” as but one historically embedded notion, a political concept and as metaphor with which to challenge, transgress and reimagine urban coastal futures.

This conference therefore also serves as an open invitation to explore and play with similar transcultural notions of cohabiting land and water at the same time, particularly across the vast heterogeneity of urban space and their practices at placemaking.