Peripheral: Resilient Hydrological Infrastructures

This article addresses the issue of developing designs of resilient hydrological infrastructures for cities facing sea level rise in the Anthropocene. It undertakes short case studies of differently scaled cities, three in the Global North and three in the Global South. The aim is to investigate the current water management situations in order to reveal potentials for increased urban and environmental resilience. Cities are approached as complex adaptive systems (CAS) negotiating uncertainty that concerns designing for resilience, understood as viable transitions for their interlinked social, ecological, and technological systems (SETS). The main finding is that, despite obvious differences, the six cases are surprisingly similar. Potentials for increased hydrological resilience reside in design approaches that work differently with what is currently deprivileged and considered ‘merely’ peripheral. Peripheral cities and the peripheries of coastal cities are found to be of key rather than minor adaptive infrastructural import. To reprivilege the peripheral here means to adopt more dynamically flexible, long-term, decentralized, and nonanthropocentric urban design approaches to water and infrastructures. Specifically, this article advocates thinking about water via at least four critical displacements. These displacements point toward alternatives concerning excessively static and land-based designs, short-term planning, overly anthropocentric conceptions of the city environment distinction, and undue centrism in planetary urbanization of the Global North and Global South. In conclusion, this article presents a brief outlook to other cases which suggest that greater resilience potentials are likely to be found in planning for the complexly ecotone city. This works mostly bottom-up from the local regimes for water sensitive infrastructures to regional network designs that can engage with larger climatic and ecological landscapes.