Radical Resilience

Coastal cities such as Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam are particularly affected by climate change due to flooding and rising sea levels. In view of future threat scenarios, resilient policies are the new key element of urban policy. They aim to strengthen a city's adaptive capacity to climate shocks, but often disregard existing and gender-specific resilience practices ‘on the ground’. At the same time, international ‘political templates’ for flood protection measures that provide a certain body of knowledge about how best to deal with floods are often unreflectively implemented at the national level.

In this context, the project aims to understand the multiple connections between local and gender-specific practices of flood control, the power of knowledge production and its financialization. It also investigates the worldviews that inform the modeling and forecasting of flood data and how these shape notions of climate change, risk and resilience globally and "elsewhere".

The research is a multi-sited endeavor with sites in Europe (Germany, Switzerland, Italy) and Vietnam.