Urban coasts in face of sea level rise are the subject of contested speculative futuring practices in which visualizations in the form of design studies, blueprints and the like play a major role. Those visualizations of coastal transformation often evoke similar images of a coastal urbanity in which infrastructures for sea level rise adaptation are easily combined with high-end living quarters, futuristic working spaces and sites of leisure, tourism etc. The seminar will be divided into two parts. During the first half, the speakers will offer two case-study overviews crosscutting Indonesia, the Netherlands and Singapore. During the second and more practice-led and interactive half, participants will collaboratively work with common visualizations of modular art assets, many of which relay pervasive imaginaries of coastal futures and their blind spots in coastal placemaking in urban Southeast Asia and Europe. We will address not only established expectations, but also provoke refractions together with perspectives on multiple possibilities of design innovation and transformation across urban coastlines.

Rapti Siriwardane-de Zoysa is a marine social scientist at the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT), Germany. She holds a D.Phil in Development Anthropology from the University of Bonn. As a postdoctoral member of ZMTs Development and Knowledge Sociology working group, she co-leads a German Science Foundation funded research project (BlueUrban), within which her ethnographic work on the cultural politics of urban seacoasts in archipelagic Southeast Asia broadly rests.

Johannes Herbeck studied geography, political science and sociology in Munich. He is senior researcher at the Sustainability Research Centre University of Bremen and works as lecturer at the Department of Geography, University of Bremen. His research interests include coastal adaptation policies and technologies, policy mobilities, and political ecology. In 2014, he defended his PhD thesis entitled “Geographies of climate change: vulnerability, security and translocality”. Since then, he has worked as scientific coordinator and currently co-leads the BlueUrban-project.

Please register for this lecture via email at seasriseprotect me ?!uni-bremenprotect me ?!.de. Registration will be possible until December 6th, 8pm CET. A link for the meeting will follow shortly after.

Flyer "Tidal Cities: Contested Speculative Futures Of Urban Shorelines"

Program "The Sea Is Rising And So Are We"