Towards Blue Urbanism for Sea Level Change Adaptation: Global Trajectories and Speculative Futuring in Island Southeast Asia (BlueUrban)

Project leader
Dr. Johannes Herbeck

Project duration
09/2019 - 09/2023

Funding
DFG

Description
BlueUrban focuses global networks of innova­tions for sea level change adaptation by following them from the sites where they are developed, to places of circulation, to the actual implementa­tion in projects.

The project will trace two concrete technologies of coastal adaptation, multifunctional dikes and floating structures, and map the patterns of their global circulation. The project will also offer a typology of both actor constellations (discourse carriers) and modes of information and commu­nication (discursive channels) that facilitate the circulation of the two technologies.

BlueUrban is designed as multi-sited ethno­graphic research that allows to follow technol­ogies and innovations from sites in which ideas are seeded and designed, to test beds and spaces of implementation. It thereby covers different research sites and analytical units, ranging from university working groups in Europe and Asia, to conferences and fairs that take place for example in Singapore and Japan, to implemented projects in secondary cities in Indonesia and the Philippines, also closely tracking how the solutions themselves change.