Radical Resilience
Encountering Flood Policies, Knowledge Formations and Climate Transformation Processes in Ho Chi Minh City
(2022 - today)
Funded within the framework of the
"Walter-Benjamin Fellowship" (DFG)
in cooperation with the University of Social Sciences and Humanities (Vietnam), University of Osaka (Japan), Polytechnic University Turin (Italy) and the Beyond Inhabitation Lab

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 productions and inscribed hegemonic and heteronormative worldviews, and flood policies that are based on satellite data in Vietnamese and Cambodian coastal regions.