Amphibious Urbanism
Related terms: blue humanities, climate change, design, infrastructure, urbanism
The seas are rising to meet us. Even if climate action intensifies in decades to come, the next few centuries will almost certainly involve a steady increase in sea level rise. Something climate scientists do not discuss very often is that even the most optimistic future scenario from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (RCP 2.6) – a scenario in which the world acts swiftly and decisively to change its ways and lower its carbon footprint – predicts atmospheric CO2 equivalent concentrations around 430-480 parts per million (ppm) in the year 2100 (see Figure 1 below). That is higher than today’s atmospheric concentrations, but not by very much.
The problem is that according to paleoclimatologists – the scientists who study the history of the Earth’s climate systems – the last time the Earth experienced an extended period above 400ppm CO2 was during the Pliocene Epoch, three million years ago, when the global average sea level was 20 to 25 meters higher than it is today. It takes a while for glacial masses and ice sheets to catch up with atmospheric conditions so that melt will not occur all at once. The current high-end projections for sea level rise in 2100 are only 2.2 meters (7.2 feet). But even that level of rise will be catastrophic for many of the world’s coastal cities as they currently exist. Indeed, C40 predicts that by 2050, 800 million people living in 570 cities – including megacities like Shanghai, Mumbai, and New York – will endure serious risks from sea level rise and related climate impacts (C40 Cities 2018). Figure 2 shows what the Boston area looks like at ~2 meters of sea level rise, and the picture is not pretty. With the rate of global mean sea level rise having doubled in the past three decades (Harrington et al, 2024), higher-end scenarios for 2100 seem increasingly likely.
What climate science is telling us is that the world needs to start preparing, and quickly, for the reality of what might be called ‘amphibious urbanism.’ Environmental anthropologist Caspar Bruun Jensen explains: “After a few centuries where terrestrialization was in the ascendant, the amphibious is gaining new life. In many parts of the world, water now seems to be flowing back into land, submerging coastal areas on a semi-permanent basis or creating recurrent floods, making the insufficiency of terrestrial responses increasingly apparent” (Jensen 2017, 225). What Jensen means is that coastal cities are increasingly going to have to learn to live with the routine presence of water. They will need to learn how to adapt to tidal incursions, more intense storms and rainfall, increasing salination of freshwater resources, and more frequent floods.
The term ‘flood’ deserves careful examination and criticism from the perspective of environmental humanities. Long before the worst impacts of sea level rise are felt, floods will become a more constant companion of coastal urban life around the world. But what exactly is a ‘flood’? The simple answer is that water is somewhere it is not supposed to be. But landscape architects Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha have challenged the seeming obviousness of this idea. They argue that the concept of ‘flooding’ is a symptom of colonial cartography (Mathur and Da Cunha n.d.). It is difficult to disentangle the idea of flooding from the historical, often colonial work of controlling wetness, of confining it to certain abstractly determined river landscapes, thus rendering all other space as ‘dry’ and fit for human ownership and occupation. Rivers, according to them, are always at least partly human creations as humans try to maintain a fixed boundary between dry land and watercourse. Da Cunha writes, “the line transgressed is not simply a line drawn; it is a line imposed. Furthermore, this line does not simply separate water from land; it creates water and land on either side of it as entities that can be commodified and as such coveted, made scarce, and violated” (Da Cunha 2019, xi). Rather than thinking about dry land and watercourse as stable, separate entities, Mathur and Da Cunha challenge us to think about planetary life as an “ocean of wetness” (Mathur and Da Cunha n.d.) in which dry land is always an exception and never the rule.
That kind of perspective is valuable at a time when coastal urban amphibiousness is on the rise. Unlike the more comfortably terrestrial cities of the Holocene period, the amphibious cities of the Anthropocene will have a blurrier boundary between water and dry land. But what if we tried to reconsider that blurriness not as a bug but as a feature? Amphibians not only need wetness to survive, but they also thrive in wetness. What if we could similarly consider wetness not as a condition of urban life to be battled but as a condition that could and should be embraced? What new modes of urban life could emerge from that attitude adjustment?
Much of my imaginative work on urban wetness has focused on my adoptive home of Houston, a megacity residing in ancestral wetlands, a muddy place since its inception and a site of constant flooding. Built over coastal prairie, woodlands, and swamplands, Houston’s search for dry land has been a constant yet precarious enterprise since the beginning. As local architect Larry Albert explains, efforts to “divide swampland into solid ground and watercourse” have been the central infrastructural struggle of the city’s history: “…to live, we separate something dry and something wet from the undifferentiated muck” (Albert 1997, 144).
In Houston, muck has intensified in recent years. After three so-called “500-year storms” visited the city within the space of 24 months between 2015 and 2017, the stakes of this struggle heightened. Hurricane Harvey alone resulted in $125 billion worth of damage and trillions of cubic feet of floodwater. At one point during the storm, 45 cm of water covered 70% of the surface area of Harris County, home to more than 4.5 million people. Floodwaters damaged 204,000 homes – 75% of them outside the official floodplain. In the storm aftermath, Harris County voters approved an unprecedented $2.5 billion flood bond to pay for 181 stormwater infrastructure projects to help reduce flood risks. The projects ranged from home buyouts through widened, channelised watercourses to new bridges, expanded upstream detention systems, and more. This sounds impressive, and it may even reduce flood risks temporarily for some residents. However, the largest stormwater infrastructure project Houston has seen since the 1930s – Project Brays – cost $550 million and took over 20 years to complete. And yet Harvey inundated the neighbourhoods it was meant to keep dry.
Houston will not become a truly coastal city in this century. But if Pliocene-like atmospheric conditions are allowed to endure for a period of centuries, Houston will eventually become a coastal city at 20-25 meters of sea level rise. Meanwhile, more urgent threats are looming from storm-related watery precarity. Houston is home to a deepwater port and the largest petrochemical industrial complex in the United States. On any given day, Houston bunkers 9 billion gallons of petrochemicals in ageing, poorly regulated containers, most of them less than a meter above sea level and situated near the Houston Ship Channel, which flows down to the Gulf of Mexico. Disaster modellers have determined that if a Category 4 or Category 5 hurricane were to make landfall at Galveston Bay and push a 6-meter storm surge back up the Ship Channel, it is very likely that Houston would experience a massively catastrophic petrochemical spill, probably the worst such disaster in U.S. history. That could happen this year, or it could happen next year. Without major changes to Houston’s economy and infrastructure, it may be that Houston will not live to see its amphibious future.
Still, while fighting for change today, we try to remain optimistic about what the future might bring, what it might mean to live happily with our muck. Working together with my partner Cymene Howe and local artist Ilse Harrison, we tried to imagine what a fully amphibious Houston of the future might look like. As a transdisciplinary collaboration seeking to harness the speculative capacities of art and design, we challenged ourselves to look past today’s Houston and its current relationship to water and wondered how amphibiousness might evolve and what its physical and cultural forms might look like. What kinds of amphibious sensibilities will emerge as hopeless projects of ‘defence’ against water yield to acceptance of wetness as coastal fluidity grows? Figure 3 offers a glimpse of a possible amphibious Houston.
This amphibious Houston has long left its ecocidal investment in fossil fuels behind. Those infrastructures – pipelines, tankers, storage containers– are little more than curious reefs on the fringe of a city that now experiences coastal tides and dense mangrove forests at its periphery. Houston’s characteristic 20th-century sprawl is also now a thing of the past. There is no more terrestrial automobility since dry land is scarce. People move instead by small sailboats and solar-powered motorboats along the bayous and channels that crosscut them. Cul-de-sac suburbanism makes no sense in a place without cars and lawns. Houston has adapted its urban form by becoming denser and more vertical to lower its resource use and demands upon local ecosystems. A complicated system of massive stilts and flotation apparatuses allows homes and businesses in the core of the city to either rise above the water or to ebb and flow with it. At the periphery, many structures, especially those invested in Houston’s new dominant industry – sustainable aquaculture – are modular. Spherical structures that look like fish eggs venture out to harvest from aquafarms in the larger, warmer Gulf of Mexico. When supercyclones threaten, the modules can band together for protection and float in packs. In this world, a storm surge can redistribute the floating elements of Houston temporarily, but it can never fully inundate or destroy them. The dominant theme of amphibious Houston is to move with water rather than against it. The ocean of wetness always has the final word.
To find our way forward to this and other possible amphibious futures, what we need to cultivate is what Charlotte Lemanski (2019) calls “infrastructural citizenship.” Infrastructure is about enablement; something is an infrastructure only to the extent that it enables something else to happen. Current infrastructure tends to enable the reproduction of the status quo, but new infrastructure could enable new trajectories. “Infrastructural citizenship” is civic attention to and engagement with infrastructure in ways that allow us to lay the groundwork (and waterwork) for more sustainable futures. Nikhil Anand (2017) has called the kind of infrastructural citizenship that concerns itself with water “hydraulic citizenship.” Amphibious cities will need active and imaginative hydraulic citizenship to survive and thrive.
Amphibious urbanism will emerge through experiments in reimagining the relationship of terrestrial urbanism to the ocean of wetness. To take Houston’s flooding again as an example, Keiji Asakura offers a fundamental way of rethinking the problem. Once upon a time, the legendary Harris County public infrastructure czar, Art Storey, told Asakura that if every building in Houston had an adjacent rain catchment or rain garden, it would put the local flood control district out of business. A rain garden is a very humble infrastructure that consists of digging a hole or trench in the ground a few feet deep. Into the dugout, you place logs, branches, sticks, leaves, mulch, pretty much anything at hand. And then you fill back in the soil and plant it over, ideally with local coastal prairie vegetation whose root systems can run meters deep and are excellent at sponging up water. As a rain garden ages, the logs and leaves decompose, creating new, excellent soil that can be harvested in a periodic process of rain garden renewal for projects like raised bed urban farms. Meanwhile, the rain garden prevents rainwater from becoming runoff by holding it until it can be absorbed into the soil. This addresses a large part of Houston’s current problem; the city is covered by too much impermeable concrete, while the underlying soil has a lot of dense clay in it, which needs more time to absorb water.
Together with Asakura and local leaders in the Kashmere/Trinity/Houston Gardens neighbourhoods of Northeast Houston, we have been working to create rain gardens as an alternative to conventional stormwater infrastructure. The amazing thing about rain gardens is their relatively low bar to entry, which is especially important in Northeast Houston, an underprivileged area of the city that has suffered greatly from Houston’s long history of environmental racism – the expectation that communities of color suffer disproportionate pollution burdens and inadequate access to critical infrastructure (Bullard 2000). Conventional stormwater infrastructure is immensely expensive to make, uses a lot of high-energy materials like concrete, takes forever to build and, as such, is a domain controlled by the political and financial elite. It is also not a domain that offers effective solutions, given the rapid pace of climate change. Within only twenty years, Houston’s 500-year flood plain became a 100-year flood plain, rendering many conventional stormwater interventions obsolete. Blue and green infrastructures like rain gardens are a different approach entirely, taking very little technology, time and expense to accomplish. All the tools that are needed to make a rain garden are no more than medieval technology: shovels and wheelbarrows. Depending on the size of the project, a rain garden can take as little as a few hours or as much as a few days to create. The main cost is finding infrastructural citizens willing to dig and fill, and plant.
Amphibious urbanism needs “revolutionary infrastructure” (Boyer 2023) to come into being. Infrastructure has lately become a major area of inquiry in the human sciences, not least because infrastructure is an intrinsically relational analytic category that allows one to investigate the conditions of possibility for various forms of social life (Amin 2014, Anand et al 2018, Berlant 2016, Bowker 2015, Easterling 2014, Edwards 2003, Furlong 2014, Gandy 2008, Jensen and Morita 2017, Morita 2016). In my conception, evolutionary infrastructure projects are experiments in creating new relations and enabling alternative future trajectories to those that have brought us to the brink of ecological emergency. Projects of revolutionary infrastructure are diverse, locally attuned and typically invisible to conventional infrastructural politics. The radical rain garden plan outlined above has no traction yet in mainstream Houston politics, at least not for the moment. Yet, because it is hard to make something out of nothing, revolutionary infrastructure often captures and redistributes the materials and energies within existing infrastructural ecologies to do its work. The modern shovel was designed as a tool for the mastery of the soil. But in the case of a rain garden, those same shovels are now meshing differently into ecological relations to try to create more balanced, respectful and sustainable alliances between human and nonhuman forces. We could consider this work as also part of a broader “re-wilding” of research and practice in the environmental humanities (Fredengren 2018).
Amphibious urbanism will have its challenges, but it will also offer a great many opportunities for positive change. The Anthropocene is going to demand new kinds of urbanism across the world. And it would be in our collective human and nonhuman interest to develop urbanisms that seek to live with, rather than to wage war against, more-than-human water-based forces and beings.
References
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