Radical Resilience
Encountering Flood Policies, Knowledge Formations and Climate Transformation Processes in Ho Chi Minh City
(2023 - 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 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.
The research is a multi-sited endeavor with sites in Europe and Vietnam.
How do urban dwellers deal with everyday flooding? How does the city? And what impact do have forecasts on our understanding of nature?
Video: Multimodal Workshop: "Sensing Floods",
Feb 2024 in HCMC
Publications
Stadtbeben
Wahrscheinlich hätte sie sich die Arbeit daran sparen können, denn gerade in den alten Stadtvierteln stammten die Abwassersysteme noch aus der französischen Kolonialzeit. Und sowieso kam es immer wieder vor, dass Rohre, die eigentlich Abwasser ableiten sollten, mit Grundwasser in Berührung kamen – es war ein undurchsichtiges, aber doch systematisch gelegtes Rohr-Gewirr. Wirkliche Expertin konnte man nur durch jahrelange Erfahrung werden. Aber dann war man die Königin der Unterwelt – im wahrsten Sinne des Wortes. May schmunzelte, der Gedanke gefiel ihr. Vorwärts ging es weiter in den sich vor ihr öffnenden Schlund.
An ethnographic Cli-Fi story
2024, edition assemblage
Machine Sensing & Situated Practicing
Flood Forecasting as Environments of Knowledge
forthc., Kulturanthropologie Notizen
with Sara Kinell
Reintegrating the Unpredictable
Data Infrastructures and the Flow of Climate Knowledge
forthc., ESTS