Flows in formation: The global-urban networks of climate change adaptation

Abstract

Chinese

As climate change threats to urban centres become more alarming, cities are proposing ambitious plans to adapt to climate impacts. These plans are increasingly subsumed within urban development projects, and embedded in global flows of capital and networks of environmental governance and planning. And yet, scholarship on urban adaptation has tended to approach the city as an analytically bounded territory, neglecting interconnections across space and processes of globalisation, urbanisation, and geopolitics. This paper extends theories of relational geographies to explore the emerging conditions of urban adaptation in the context of climate change and globalised urban development. Focusing on the global links of Dutch water expertise, and tracing relationships within and between Rotterdam, New York, and Jakarta, it illustrates the formation of global-urban networks – the multiscalar, multilevel connections through which capital, knowledge, and influence flow. It probes the ways in which these networks emerge to mobilise ideas and influence across geographical scales and political boundaries, driven and defined by interrelated factors including economic relationships, historically defined situational relationships, and interface conditions including narratives of culture and environmental urgency. The paper introduces the concept of ‘network formation’ to see and understand such interconnected, relational processes. It explains the spatial and temporal interconnections within and across sites, and the relationships between urban spatial projects and broader political economies and ecologies. The paper asserts the importance of conceptualising the relationships and interfaces of increasingly mobile and interconnected urban environmental futures.

Keywords

built environment climate change environment/sustainability infrastructure planning theory urban politics

Interconnected urban sites¹

In October 2012, Hurricane Sandy hit the New York City region. The storm reinforced ongoing initiatives and precipitated new efforts to protect the city from climate change-exacerbated storms and sea level rise. Among these was Rebuild By Design. Launched by the Presidential Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force in June 2013, the competition was charged with finding ‘innovative, implementable proposals that promote resilience in the Sandy-affected region’ (Rebuild By Design, 2013). Ten teams produced design proposals for sites in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. They envisioned, among them, the ‘BIG U’, protective landscapes and buildings along lower Manhattan (by the BIG team) and ‘living breakwaters’ of oysters and shellfish along the eastern shore of Staten Island (by the SCAPE team).

In January 2013, massive floods hit Jakarta, Indonesia, considered among the most vulnerable cities to climate change. This followed severe inundations in 1996, 2002, and 2007. The floods bolstered initiatives to address the city’s failing infrastructure, including projects to dredge and widen waterways and evict residents of informal kampung settlements along them. In April 2014, on a Jakarta visit, Dutch infrastructure and environment minister Melanie Schultz announced the National Capital Integrated Coastal Development (NCICD) masterplan. Known as the Giant Sea Wall, it proposes a new city for 1.5 million people on reclaimed land in the Jakarta Bay. Shaped like the Garuda, the mythical bird that is Indonesia’s national symbol, the plan promises to solve flooding, function as a freshwater reservoir, and provide a modern waterfront and central business district.

Cursory studies of Rebuild By Design and the Giant Sea Wall reveal extensive Dutch involvement. Rebuild By Design principle Henk Ovink was formerly Netherlands director general of spatial planning and water affairs. Participating teams prominently featured Dutch designers and engineers.² The cause of the 2007 Jakarta floods, attributed to severe land subsidence, was determined in part by Dutch research institute Deltares. The NCICD masterplan, funded by the Dutch government, is authored primarily by Dutch engineering, design, and development firms.³ The triangulation is completed when, in September 2014, the Netherlands Water Partnership organised a delegation from Indonesia to visit New York and New Orleans to learn about adaptation projects (Connecting Delta Cities, 2014).

How might we understand the relationships between actors, institutions, and physical places of the Netherlands, renowned for spatial planning and water management, and sites of environmental challenges and adaptation initiatives in New York and Jakarta? Urban researchers have long emphasised interconnectivities of capital and information across geographic scales (Friedmann, 1986; Sassen, 1991) and the material and social conditions of networked societies (Castells, 1989, 1996). Environmental researchers recognise emerging cross-scalar institutions of global climate governance (Bulkeley et al., 2014). And yet, much discourse around urban climate change adaptation, developed on the bases of case studies, comparisons, and surveys, still approaches the city as a distinct, analytically bounded entity.

This paper extends theories of ‘relational geographies’ – cities as ‘spatial formations’ understood in relation to each other (Amin, 2004; also, Jacobs, 2012; Massey, 2011; Roy, 2009) – to probe the conceptual and material landscapes of global and urban interconnectivities in the context of climate change and globalised urban development. I trace the development of emerging urban environmental plans, and propose the concept of a ‘network formation’ to understand relationships that bridge geographic scales and institutional levels. I argue that these emerging networks form in response to shifting political-economic and environmental conditions to mobilise ideas and influence across sites and boundaries. They build on economic relationships, including promises of economic growth, situational relationships, defined by historical bases of knowledge and power, and specific interface conditions, including narratives of culture and environmental urgency.

Urban adaptation to climate change

Climate change threats to urban centres include disrupted livelihoods in coastal areas from storm surges and sea level rise; the breakdown of infrastructure networks and critical services resulting from extreme weather events; health impacts in periods of extreme heat; and food insecurity linked to warming, drought, flooding, and uncertain precipitation (IPCC, 2013). Adaptation to climate change has been emphasised by the increase of climate-related disasters, inadequate action on mitigation, and the inclusion of the ‘loss and damage agenda’ in multilateral negotiations and courts (Khan and Roberts, 2013).

Research on urban adaptation, developed based on case studies of city vulnerabilities and responses (e.g. Alam and Rabbani, 2007; Awuor et al., 2008; Dodman et al., 2010; Moser et al., 2010; Porio, 2011), is expanding, with varied, contested trajectories (Meerow and Mitchell, 2017). Scholars have conducted surveys of plans (Carmin et al., 2012b; Castán Broto and Bulkeley, 2013; Hughes, 2015). They have explored policy strategies and motivations (Carmin et al., 2012a), capacities of governance (Birkmann et al., 2010), policy guidelines and assessments (Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network (ACCCRN), 2013; Rosenzweig et al., 2011), and adaptation frameworks (da Silva et al., 2012; Tyler and Moench, 2012). They assert the disparate vulnerabilities faced by poor residents (Dodman and Satterthwaite, 2008; Huq et al., 2007), the role of civil society (Chu et al., 2016), and issues of injustice in adaptation planning (Anguelovski et al., 2016; Shi et al., 2016).

With some exceptions,⁴ much of this research approaches the city as an analytically bounded territory, with complex yet cohesive governance structures and relationships of power. Social, spatial, and economic inequality feature heavily. But interconnections across space and processes of globalisation, urbanisation, and geopolitics are neglected.

This bounded emphasis is inadequate. Climate change causes and impacts traverse the global to the local, involving an array of governance entities. Nation states engage in multilateral negotiations through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), receiving input from a global scientific body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Local governments respond to state regulations and learn and share through transnational municipal networks such as C40 Cities. Development agencies, lending institutions, philanthropies, and environmental organisations participate at each of these scales and levels, in a system of ‘multilevel governance’ (Bulkeley and Betsill, 2005, 2013).

Furthermore, we see the ‘metropolitanisation’ of climate change, where cities are viewed as a large part of the problem and a necessary part of the solution (Reid and Satterthwaite, 2007; Rosenzweig et al., 2010). Coalitions of economic and ecological interests in cities position themselves as the obvious actors and places to address climate threats. They propose interventions to secure and protect resource flows and economic zones, often resulting in infrastructural unevenness, deepening inequities, and ‘ecological enclaves’ (Hodson and Marvin, 2010). This heightens the ideological and material stakes of the city in climate change responses, making it critical to understand the broader relationships behind them.

Researchers of ‘relational geographies’ respond to the problem of dynamic, interconnected sites, tracing urban space as flows and relationships beyond territory (Amin, 2004; Jacobs, 2012; Massey, 2011; Roy, 2009). Roy and Ong (2011: 3) point to the urban as a field of experimentation – a ‘nexus of situated and transnational ideas, institutions, actors, and practices’ – and to ‘inter-referencing’ – cities borrowing from and measuring by other cities. Peck (2011: 2) asserts that policymaking processes are increasingly mobile – crossing horizontally across geographic scales, and vertically between institutional levels – and accelerating – shortening development cycles – a ‘relational interpenetration of policy-making sites and activities’.⁵ And scholars stress the fragmentation of authority and shifts in responsibility to local governments and non-state entities, with subnational governments, NGOs, and firms experimenting with transnational environmental governance (Bulkeley et al., 2014).

These theories illuminate emerging global-urban processes, and provide some conceptual specificity. But, besides the work on fragmentation, they have not engaged with the problems of climate change.⁶ Why, how, and under what conditions do these interconnections among sites and cities form?

Thinking relationally, Jacobs (2012) asserts, necessitates going beyond discerning simple presence (of policies and actors). Jacobs underscores the differences between topographical understandings of interconnectivities – the networked city, municipalities linked by institutions – and topological ones – city ‘as mobility’, crumbling aspects of physicality, territoriality, and distance. My analysis proceeds between these distinctions. It attends to interactions between urban processes that happen beyond and despite the territorial and political delineations of the city, but then reflect back on them. The ‘city’ as a construct remains, inasmuch as processes smaller and larger than the territorial unit are informed by its politics and its position as an object of imaging and contestation.

In tracing how and why networks form, I focus on relationships between biophysical environmental change and the institutional shifts motivated by political-economic change. In effect, I investigate multiple adaptations: on one level, the (institutional and physical) modifications directly in response to climate change, and, on another, the adaptations to reconfigured global and urban spaces of possibility. In particular, for the latter, I explore the emerging governance arrangements across scales – motivated both by global political-economic trajectories and environmental change – and changing ideologies and capacities of spatial interventions in cities.

In the following sections, I describe the formation of multiscalar, multilevel connectivities. I trace the inwards and outwards forces changing urban and environmental planning in the Netherlands. I then illustrate their links to initiatives in New York and Jakarta, two cities made exemplary by the strength of their interconnections within global networks, and the ways in which they reveal the globalising and relocalising efforts. I explain the motivations behind such mobilising, the conditions of their emergence, and their implications.

Multiscalar multilevel interconnections

Nation state to the world

The Netherlands has embarked on a concerted effort to promote its urban water expertise. The reasons for this are rooted in political-economic and ecological conditions at home and globally.

Almost one-third of the country, reclaimed from peat bogs and shallow seas, is under sea level, with another one-third requiring protections from river flooding. Historically, it accomplished this reorganisation of land and water through the ‘polder’ system, a collective social, environmental, and spatial framework through which farmers contribute towards the drainage and maintenance of land. The first ‘water boards’ were formed in 1250, with increasingly extensive and centralised flood protection since. The 1953 North Sea Flood prompted the formation of the Delta Commission and the planning of the Delta Works – dikes, dams, and barriers to protect the most populated areas from a 10,000-year storm – culminating in the Maeslant storm barrier on the Nieuwe Waterweg, Rotterdam, in 1997.

Planning for water management has been controlled by the national government in conjunction with regional water boards (Kuks, 2009). It has focused, historically, on hard infrastructure and hydrological engineering – ‘dredge, drain, reclaim’ (Stive and Vrijling, 2010). But economic restructuring and climate change have shifted this. First, economic liberalisation has led to the decentralisation of decision-making and more local, market-driven approaches to planning and development (Gerrits et al., 2012; Marshall, 2014). Restructuring coupled with the post-2008 recession has motivated agencies and firms to find different ways to fund projects.

Second, climate change poses new threats, including rising seas, warmer temperatures, increasing precipitation, and uncertainty in a system dependent on balance and predictability. A new Delta Commission (2008) proposed increasing protections of diked areas by a factor of ten, and also recommended more flexible responses. Approaches such as ‘Room for the River’ – reconstructing selected dikes to allow occasional, localised flooding (Rijke et al., 2012) – and the ‘sand engine’ – using the power of wind and waves to help distribute sand – combine engineering with natural dynamics. Proponents call this ‘building with nature’ – still technocratic, yet ecological (de Vriend and van Koningsveld, 2012).

On one level, many environmental projects are now conceived on a local scale. On another level, there is an outward shift toward international relationships. Rotterdam is a prime example of this dual outlook. It launched Rotterdam Climate Proof in 2008 — tasked with ensuring climate change resilience by 2025 – and promotes itself as a model for adaptation. The Rotterdam programme adheres to the Dutch emphasis on spatial planning. But it is strongly economic in strategy, emphasising livability, attraction, and image (Rotterdam, 2013).

Rotterdam Climate Proof builds on the second International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR) in 2005, titled ‘The Flood’, and the city’s second Water Plan, with its vision of a ‘water city’ linking spatial development with water management (Rotterdam, 2007). ‘Before 2005 water was a plague, and after 2005 water was an opportunity’, says the programme’s manager.⁷ Officials tout pilot projects such as garages with stormwater storage, floating pavilions, and ‘water squares’ – recreational spaces that protect against flooding from cloudbursts. They talk of ‘serendipity’ and ‘coincidences’ in explaining Rotterdam’s visibility, but also of urging the mayor to take on a larger role in national climate initiatives, and creating a narrative around the city’s propensity for adaptability and change. ‘We started writing our own story. We had change agents in Rotterdam … chemistry on all levels’.⁸

Several entities play key roles in linking municipal programmes such as Rotterdam’s with international relationships. One is Connecting Delta Cities (CDC), a network of 13 cities (including Rotterdam, New York, and Jakarta), part of C40 Cities. Coordinated by a secretariat in the Rotterdam climate programme, it convenes member cities and serves as a depository of knowledge and best practices. CDC increases its reach by linking with larger international conferences, including the C40 summits.⁹ Another is Deltares, formed in 2008 through a merger of public and private hydraulic and geotechnical entities. Deltares maintains its independent status while partly funded by the Netherlands Ministries of Economic Affairs, Agriculture and Innovation, and Foreign Affairs (Deltares, 2012). Its primary purpose is to ‘make [knowledge] available to the Dutch government and to the Dutch private sector’,¹⁰ creating symbiotic relationships between businesses and policies. It has been involved in developments in Dubai and Singapore, and in the Dutch Dialogues planning sessions in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. A third is the Netherlands Water Partnership (NWP), consisting of 200 businesses, government agencies, and NGOs. NWP helps the Dutch water sector gain international impact by providing ‘network, knowledge, visibility and influence’ (NWP, n.d.). It enables consortia of members to enter ‘markets in clusters, offering expertise as a one-stop-shop’, and partners with Dutch agencies on national policy initiatives.

These entities, alongside the national and municipal programmes, provide capacities for city modelling, scientific research, and marketing. While Dutch planning is generally seen as centralised, these initiatives show a more reflexive, multiscalar operation. Shifting conditions are embraced as opportunities to rework Dutch socio-spatial relationships, and to retune planning and knowledge institutions to an increasingly climate-aware and alarmed global audience. The adaptations are in the systems of planning as well as the objects of planning. Flood protection that has largely focused on regional infrastructure such as the Delta Works now includes coordinated urban projects. In this shift, social and spatial adaptation is not just in response to climate change, it is towards new modes of urban environmental project making. Cities are not just protected by the dikes. They are a feature of the protection.

Nation states to the cities

If urban spatial visions animate the Netherlands’ emerging expertise, they circulate globally through multiscalar, multilevel, and historically defined frameworks.

On a national level, the Netherlands recently affirmed memorandums of understanding (MOUs) with both the USA and Indonesia. In March 2013, the Netherlands Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment (IenM) and the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) agreed to a MOU for cooperation in sustainable urban development and water management, signed by Dutch Minister Melanie Schultz and HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan in Washington, DC (US HUD and Netherlands IenM, 2013). Minister Schultz’s April 2014 visit to Jakarta to announce the NCICD masterplan was also to reaffirm a 2012 MOU between the Netherlands and Indonesia on water and environment (Indonesia, Ministry of Public Works, 2014; Netherlands, 2014a). A multitude of MOUs have been brokered between national and subnational governments and Dutch entities towards cooperation on sustainable urban development and water management.¹¹

Dutch involvement in New York and Jakarta long pre-date these initiatives. Both cities served formative periods as Dutch colonial settlements – New York as Nieuw-Amsterdam in 1624, Jakarta as Batavia in 1619. Jakarta continues to bear the physical, social, and institutional marks of three centuries of colonisation. In New York, colonial traces are more ceremonial. In these diverse contexts, present-day Dutch initiatives land with varying ease.

In both cities, a specific environmental event marked a shift in longer relationships. In New York, post-Hurricane Sandy efforts including the Presidential Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force and the state-led NYS 2100 Commission (HSRTF, 2013; NYS 2100, 2013) followed ongoing initiatives such as PlaNYC (the sustainability plan) and the New York City Climate Change Adaptation Task Force (NPCC, 2010, 2015; City of New York (NYC), 2007, 2011), as well as the Rising Currents exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 2010, exploring design responses to sea level rise. Launched by the presidential task force and overseen by HUD, Rebuild By Design’s organisational entity and competition phase were privately funded, primarily by the Rockefeller Foundation. The implementation phase is backed by US$930 million in federal Community Development Block Grants – Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR). This operationally links an international, climate change-focused design competition with federal funding.¹²

This arrangement empowered HUD officials to play a greater role in urban resilience conversations at local and international levels, while the promise of federal funds motivated local government cooperation and enthusiasm.¹³ It also enabled a fluency and flexibility not always found in federal programmes. The Rockefeller Foundation had already conducted workshops and published papers on urban resilience, and funded the Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network (ACCCRN) since 2008. Preexisting relationships between the philanthropic organisation and HUD’s leadership enabled rapid response in the wake of the storm.¹⁴

The fluency of globally circulating ideas then encounters the relative obduracy of local politics and fragmented governance. Rebuild By Design aspired to be regional in scope, providing the planning and protection evident in the Dutch examples. But CDBG funds necessitate local, municipal control over implementation. There was cooperation but not formal implementation mechanisms between Rebuild By Design and these localities. Furthermore, Hurricane Sandy had exposed the region’s disparate vulnerability. Systemic inequities of poverty, joblessness, and access to housing and services predated the storm and were accentuated in its wake – what researchers have called a ‘tale of two Sandys’ (SRL, 2013). Rebuild By Design’s participatory process assuaged some local community concerns. But, in some ways, it postponed the discontent. Notably, in late-2014, community organisers in the Lower East Side in Manhattan questioned the prioritising of specific areas in the implementation plan.¹⁵ In mid-2017, four years since its start, the winning projects were variously making their way through local public comment and tendering processes.

Dutch involvement in Jakarta environmental planning experienced a turning point after the 2007 floods. A flood hazard mapping study by Deltares concluded that severe land subsidence – at rates up to 12 cm/year – was exacerbating flooding (Abidin et al., 2011; Brinkman and Hartman, 2009). These findings led to the Jakarta Coastal Defence Strategy (JCDS), conducted jointly by the Dutch and Indonesians (Indonesia, Ministry of Public Works, 2011). It detailed hydrological conditions, social and economic ties, infrastructural capacities, and governance roles, and outlined strategies for floodwalls in the Jakarta Bay.

The JCDS findings became the basis of the NCICD masterplan (Indonesia MENKO, 2014). Often billed as a climate change and sea level rise plan, the Giant Sea Wall is more a ‘sinking city’ plan (Goh, in press), the ‘wings’ of the seawall creating massive retention ponds designed to enable the drainage of rivers and canals and counter the effects of subsidence. This strategy is somewhat reflective of the Netherlands, where much of the population lives below sea level, protected by dikes, canals, and pumps. But while planners there have been advocating for smaller scale and ecologically attuned projects, the Giant Sea Wall harks back to classic, ‘hard’ models of Dutch planning.

Broadly, the NCICD takes technical lessons from the JCDS, and creates an urban development plan – in which the infrastructural ‘wall’ is privately funded by leasable reclaimed land. The masterplan has provoked pitched debate about large-scale development, environmental protection, and social inequality. Environmentalists express concern about its impact on ecological systems and fisheries. Activists question the masterplan’s claim of knowing what the real problem is and presupposing a solution that, once again, downplays or neglects the concerns of poor urban residents for their livelihoods and community networks.¹⁶

Global-urban network

We see a multiscalar, multilevel network – through which capital, knowledge, and influence flow. In contrast to a static view defined by stable external state relationships and internal national policies, and bounded, cohesive cities, a relational view reveals connections and interpenetrations across scales and levels (Figure 1). This network is driven and defined by interrelated factors: economic relationships, historically defined situational relationships, and a set of interface conditions.

Figure 1.

Diagram of global-urban networks.

Economic relationships

Economic development, primarily privatised urban development, underpins Dutch involvement and investment in Jakarta and New York. The Netherlands’ ‘top sectors’, national priority sectors, include water, creative industries, technology, and logistics (Netherlands EZ, n.d.). Planning for water is a key export for which the Dutch hold undeniable pedigree. Economic conditions at home have motivated the emphasis on global relationships. Climate change has only made more urgent the need for solutions. Water is a way for the Dutch to brand themselves to the world – at once economic development and foreign policy.

For Indonesia, Dutch officials are eager to see a relationship characterised by postcolonial influence and development aid transition into something more reciprocal in economic exchange – if not necessarily more equal in political power. The opportunities transcend Indonesian borders. A high-profile development in Jakarta constitutes a scaffold onto which Dutch firms can establish themselves in expanding regional markets. According to a NWP official, the Giant Sea Wall serves as ‘a vehicle for the Dutch sector to show their expertise, to be a credible partner, especially for private investors … also as a showcase project for the rest of Asian city development’.¹⁷

For Rebuild By Design in New York, the federal funds for winning proposals – a fraction of the projected costs – are meant to spur private investment. Participation in the initiative reinforces Dutch influence and expertise. This could enable the consolidation of work in the region and country by transnational engineering and project management firms such as Arcadis (involved in three of ten finalist teams). But it also broaches new roles for small firms such as De Urbanisten, designer of the Rotterdam water squares. Its participation in Rebuild By Design has opened new opportunities across the Atlantic.¹⁸ This success, in turn, positions its designs, prominently featured in Rotterdam’s climate programme and Dutch water sector marketing, within a global discourse on Dutch creative industries and environmental planning.

Situational relationships

These economic relationships highlight associated situational ones, involving historically determined and evolving geopolitical power relationships. Minister Schultz, unveiling the NCICD masterplan in Jakarta, said, ‘We Dutch feel very much at home here. We feel senang [at ease]’ (Netherlands, 2014b), a remarkable statement in a former colony. The Giant Sea Wall, in many ways, conforms to traditional notions of international development, involving top-down planning, Western expertise, and a technocratic approach. Relating economic development and private investment with imminent catastrophe, it is a kind of environment-induced disaster capitalism – perhaps a projective ‘shock doctrine’, what Klein (2007) has called efforts to secure private profits around disasters and wars. In Indonesia, where Deltares’ office is embedded in the public works ministry, these processes are empowered by persistent postcolonial ties.

And yet, the NWP official describes the struggle of proving that they are the trusted long-term partners when Korean and Japanese companies are promising solutions for less money. The NCICD may be a ‘showcase’, but its implementation has continually been in flux and doubt. In late-2015, a trilateral letter of intent was signed by Indonesia, South Korea, and the Netherlands to study joint implementation of the NCICD (Dutch Water Sector, 2015). In mid-2016, progress had slowed because of uncertainty around governance support in Indonesia.¹⁹ In 2017, a Deltares representative stated that the plan would no longer involve the ambitious Garuda landform, possibly relying on existing, tendered reclamation projects²⁰ – a decision later echoed by a government official.²¹ While postcolonial influence continues to define the terms of environmental vulnerabilities and urban governance, it is not a sufficient determinant of success.

In the USA, such explicit appeals are tempered by a sense of mutuality – perhaps a more certain feeling of being ‘at ease’. US HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan met Henk Ovink while touring the Netherlands to observe water infrastructure after Hurricane Sandy. Ovink suggested to Donovan that he help with the presidential task force effort.²² Ovink credits his background in spatial planning and policy, experience in public and private sectors, academic ties, and skills in building coalitions and alliances as key factors in making him the ‘ideal partner’ for the USA.²³

The extensive involvement of Dutch firms in New York preceded Hurricane Sandy. However, the accelerated activity after Sandy illustrates the manoeuverings of large firms such as Arcadis in a scenario of environmental risk. At a conference in 2014, an Arcadis planner recounted how the firm was central to the climate change work precipitated by Sandy. The panel moderator, a New York-based climate change scientist, corrected him, calling it a ‘mischaracterisation’ to suggest that little was happening in the city before the storm.²⁴

Ovink, now essentially an ambassador with dual roles – for Rebuild By Design and the Dutch water sector – sees it diplomatically. For him, the competition created a process through which US-based engineers and designers could learn about comprehensive planning and water management, and those from the Netherlands could understand regionalism, fragmented governance, and community engagement differently.²⁵

In Indonesia, longtime Dutch governmental and institutional relationships guide a process of problem framing and solution making. In the USA, transnational corporate and diplomatic activities are institutionally boosted after a disaster.

Interface conditions

Economic and situational relationships are reinforced by interface conditions – specific characteristics or the dynamic between the sites or actors – including cultural narratives and invocations of urgency.

The origin story of Dutch water expertise is rehearsed on multiple levels. In Rotterdam, officials talk of writing their own narrative. In public speeches worldwide, Henk Ovink recounts the development of the Netherlands’ culture of living with water, promoting its relevance for other places confronting risk (although its 800 years of societal learning is not on offer). These narratives are effective. An evaluation of the first phase of Rebuild By Design found that: first, HUD Secretary Donovan’s leadership and the commitment of federal funds were critical motivators, and, second, so was Ovink’s ‘charisma and vision’ (Urban Institute, 2014). Sustaining partnerships is seen as critical in New York as it is in Jakarta.

While the overall image of globalising Dutch water is one of coherence and organisation, friction appears around specific initiatives. Critics of the Giant Sea Wall in Jakarta express fears of a ‘black lagoon’ – sewage-laden canals draining into the proposed catchment ponds. A Dutch hydrologist acknowledges these concerns, and opines that closing off the wall might be considered a last resort. He did not foreclose alternatives, such as Room for the River-like approaches, but asserted, ‘Indonesian problems have to be solved by Indonesian people with Indonesian solutions’.²⁶ This sentiment is prevalent among Dutch individuals, who are mindful of past criticisms.²⁷ But the most ambitious version of the NCICD was carried to its launch, despite the concerns, propelled by promises of modernisation, invocations of urgency by Dutch research reports and public statements about the sinking city, and the acquiescence of local officials. Says a Jakarta official: ‘There is no other way. If not, [we will be] increasingly flooded’.²⁸

Climate change researchers have pointed to ‘adaptation regimes’ (Paprocki, 2018) and ‘resilience machines’ (Davoudi et al., 2017). The ‘machine-like’, systemic characteristics are ascribed to differential power relationships, appeals of threats and uncertain futures, and dominant modes of development. These factors are apparent in Jakarta: there is evident threat, and a draw towards modernisation and infrastructural fixes; there are few alternatives to consider, and Dutch influence and long-term power relationships and urban development dynamics are hard to shake. In New York, processes are less informed by historical power relationships, and more by an aligned vision of new urban futures promoted alike by government agencies, transnational corporations, and global philanthropies. Systemic, structural factors hold firm, propelled by economic-ecological shifts on a global scale. But they are enabled by situational and specific, conditional relationships.

Network formation

The global-urban network reveals relationalities that are cross-site and multiscalar. On one level, the motivations behind the initiatives in New York and Jakarta cannot be fully understood without relational tracings to sociospatial changes in the Netherlands. On another level, the Dutch engagements in New York and Jakarta are illuminated by relational distinction from the other; generalised forces inflected to meld to historically defined sociospatial conditions. Seeing each site from the others shows how shifting, distinct political economic conditions guide the terms of engagement and the trajectory of the relationships.

New York, Jakarta, and Rotterdam comprise a sample of dynamic global phenomena – a network formation. This concept offers a way to see and understand the terms of such interconnected processes, and to categorise a set of relationships – not to denote a concrete and unique, or exclusive, network. Nations such as the Netherlands and cities such as Rotterdam – with a convincing origin story, expertise pedigree, and internal and external motivators – cities such as Jakarta – in rapidly growing economies facing environmental and social challenges – and cities such as New York – already a central node in global economic flows, contemplating new urban futures – represent a distinct and exemplary formation (Figure 2). Rotterdam, here, functions as a reflexive site – the site itself, and the relationship between it and other sites, sharpening the analysis of each of the strategies, and the comprehension of the whole.

Figure 2.

Diagram of conceptual interfaces, relationships, and formations.

This view illustrates the ways in which national and corporate strategies might be operationalised through cities. Netherlands priority sectors are foregrounded by urban projects, municipal planning, and a web of institutions – including Connecting Delta Cities, a transnational municipal network, and Deltares, a research institute given the latitude to function as a global consultant, with public ties and private opportunities. These networks and entities, conceptually, pull the global and urban together. Besides creating symbiotic links across scales, they enable local, physical interventions such as the water square in Rotterdam to play an outsize role in international discourse, and in national and corporate strategic market making.

Recognition of the broader network is critical in light of prevalent assertions about the ‘obvious’ importance of cities, and other invocations of the ‘Urban Age’ (Burdett and Sudjic, 2007), that veil a large part of the motivations behind cities’ environmental project-making. These findings reaffirm yet complicate assertions about the ‘metropolitanisation’ of climate change. We should not too quickly accept the discourse of cities as sole or primary actors, even if we agree with the precept of strategic security and economic interests as their key drivers. We should be attendant to the operations of cities as part of broader agendas, and the extent to which city-centric emphases are driven by self-reinforcing urban development visions.

Circulating ideas reflect concrete spaces. In the context of climate change and crises, the networks mobilise and transform ideas about the spaces of society and water, bringing the biophysical workings of infrastructure and hydrology into the realm of interconnected economic flows. It is a sort of socio-hydrological addendum to Castells’ ‘space of flows’ – ideas and images about actual/material flows of water join the organisational processes of capital, information, and technology.

The network formation framework is particularly insightful where presumably stable or long-running relationships are evolving and reconfiguring in response to external and internal factors, and where a key site or actor occupies a critical node of multiple relationships. Capturing the network in formation reveals relational trajectories behind multi-sited plans that remain years in evolution, and expands the notion of process, enabling critical assessments of pivotal stages.

Seeing the network in formation also broaches specific possibilities for understanding alternative ideas and visions. These findings raise a critical line of questions that I will only note for now. Globally circulating ideas are not so free flowing on the ground, and tend to be deformed and refracted in response to local political-economic and spatial conditions. In each site, historical trajectories and geographic conditions have shaped social and environmental marginalisation, and contesting visions of urban futures. Protests arising from this contestation have often taken form against perceivable unequal distribution of resources or direct threats of displacement and dispossession. Have urban spatial protest movements reorganised themselves in response to global-urban networks? And if so, how have the concerns around locally and materially specific inequities been transposed to larger geographic scales and higher governance levels of planning?

Conclusion

I have traced the development of a kind of global-urban environmental project making. In terms of understanding places, it is neither comparative nor singular. Each site helps to reveal the others. Tracing the formation of global-urban networks transcends bounded, city-centric emphases in urban climate change research. It explains the spatial and temporal interconnections within and across sites, and the ways in which urban spatial interventions operate within broader political economies and ecologies.

As climate change threats heighten, as globalised urban development continues, and as the means through which knowledge is shared and influence peddled develop, such formations, and permutations thereof, are emerging as the crucial framework through which environmental projects are conceived and justified. I have illustrated an approach to understanding the social, spatial, and event-driven factors behind the claims on expertise and the formation of risk, and as well how different historical relationships and interfaces impact such factors. As researchers continue studying how cities respond to changing environmental and geopolitical conditions, we will need to define further new conceptual categories for the interfaces, the relationships, and the types of risk and expertise formation within networks such as this one.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my informants and collaborators for their generosity, the guest editors of the special issue for their intellectual comradeship, and the anonymous reviewers for their incisive comments.

Funding

This research was funded in part by the Center for International Studies, the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture, the William Emerson Travel Fund, and the Harold Horowitz Research Fund, all at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a Northeastern University Tier-1 grant.

Notes

ORCID iD

Kian Goh

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Flows in formation: The global-urban networks of climate change adaptation

Abstract

Keywords

Interconnected urban sites 1

Urban adaptation to climate change

Multiscalar multilevel interconnections

Nation state to the world

Nation states to the cities

Global-urban network

Economic relationships

Situational relationships

Interface conditions

Network formation

Conclusion

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Funding

Notes

ORCID iD

References

Interconnected urban sites¹