Making and unmaking the dry city : the design-politics of flood mitigation from infrastructural modernization to climate adaptation

Abstract

City leaders around the world are planning new infrastructure in response to the compound challenges of 1) flooding linked to climate change and 2) uneven urbanization. Advocates of contemporary flood mitigation efforts often frame their proposals as qualitatively different than the 'gray' levee and pump projects of previous generations. 20th century dry city infrastructural modernization projects promised to protect against flood hazards and enable urban growth, but they also had serious negative social and ecological consequences. New projects promise infrastructure that is 'green', flexible, and resilient. Building on changes in water management in the Netherlands, many recent projects around the world include a central role for designers and spatial planners. Though these new approaches have gained widespread favor, significant questions remain: Will these new flood mitigation efforts address the problems of previous generations or will they usher in more damaging mega-projects? How are the tools of design enabling and constraining transformative adaptation? To address these questions, this study analyzes the evolving politics of flood mitigation through a transnational case study of Dhaka and New Orleans, two levee-dependent cities that are considering sweeping changes to their flood mitigation strategies. The case studies use a range of data, including: archival research on flood mitigation and planning processes; field observations of built environment conditions; and interviews with residents, experts, and participants in recent planning processes. The study considers contemporary adaptation efforts in the context of historical flood mitigation and finds that, while emerging practices hold promise, there is reason for caution. By the end of the 20th century, both Dhaka and New Orleans had substantially similar systems of levees and pumps. The development of these dry city infrastructures was uneven, crisis-driven, and contested. Critics increasingly regarded levee-enabled growth as unwise and unjust. Though levee boosters promised that dry city infrastructures would bring modernization and orderly growth, once in place, each city's levees became embedded in broader socio-technical networks, or levee complexes, whose particular place-specific dynamics have created distinct patterns of uneven urbanization and vulnerability. The cases of Dhaka and New Orleans suggest that contemporary projects may not deliver their promised new paradigm of flood mitigation because: existing levee complexes are highly resistant to change; path-dependent dynamics bias planning towards 'big engineering'; and even those proposals that depart from previous practices are constrained by the entrenched material interests and epistemologies that have created the unwise and unjust patterns of the past. While the inclusion of designers offers the potential for improvements in urban flood mitigation projects, there are also serious challenges. When designers are not able or willing to grapple with the place-specific political contestations that come with major planning and infrastructure interventions, their tools can be used to depoliticize these processes, ignoring, obscuring, or rushing past the distributional impacts of flood and climate adaptation.