Karen Paiva Henrique

Climate change leads to more frequent and severe flooding, urging cities to adapt to protect their populations and assets. Despite exacerbated hazards, governments repeatedly draw on ‘tried-and-true’ approaches to protect the status quo, often with serious adverse effects for the poor and vulnerable. Yet, such dominant approaches do not go unchallenged as the media and other actors prompt public debate to assess flood impacts, scrutinise government decisions, and perhaps even promote alternative practices. News outlets are not, however, balanced or value-free; the events portrayed and the voices (and knowledges) recognised and included in media coverage deeply influence whether and how flooding is incorporated in policy. Focusing on São Paulo, Brazil, we examine how the media framed flood events and conveyed solutions during the city’s worst floods in recorded history. We demonstrate how competing media outlets largely depicted flooding as a natural phenomenon to be solved by governments and experts through existing techno-managerial practices, mirroring governmental partisan plans for adaptive action. In doing so, the media failed to offer a democratic space for public discussion, citizen contestation, and the advancement of alternative trajectories for adaptation. We posit that inclusive trajectories that address entrenched vulnerabilities and projected climate change will benefit from rigorous ethical debates around the media’s role in disaster coverage while strategically leveraging alternative media outlets as public pedagogy and agenda-setting tools.

As flood events become more intense and frequent, cities throughout the world increasingly devise projects for flood management and control, including hard and soft infrastructural solutions. Among these, an emblematic example is the project Parque Várzeas do Tietê (PVT) – or Tietê Lowlands Park – a 75 km-long floodplain restoration scheme proposed by the government of São Paulo, Brazil, to allegedly solve the city’s flooding problem. The project’s execution, however, is contingent on the removal of approximately 7500 low-income families, raising questions on the intertwined relationship between adaptation to flooding and the exclusion of informal urban settlements. Drawing on urban and feminist political ecology, we use the PVT as a case study to examine the politics and uneven outcomes of adaptation in São Paulo’s eastern periphery. We combine archival and ethnographic work to expose the persistent politics of invisibility that sustain the project’s exclusionary contours. In the process, we also demonstrate the various ways floodplain residents reshape their invisibility to contest, negotiate, and resist the PVT in the spaces of their everyday lives. As a result, the analysis identifies the project’s perverse effects but also opportunities for productive engagements between the government and local communities towards more just, inclusive, and equitable adaptation futures in São Paulo, and beyond.

Like the development industry, development pedagogy and practice have begun to take into account the role of emotions and the deeper, affective and embodied experiences of understanding and doing development. In her groundbreaking piece 'Emotional geographies of development', Sarah Wright illustrates how emotions not only create development subjects and associated subjectivities, but also provide a powerful entry point for resistance that may ultimately lead to transformative social change. Post-colonial and feminist scholars have long emphasised the role of emotions such as anger, fear, shame, joy and hope in discursive construction of the 'Other' and the persistence of false binaries that obscure layers of struggle, exclusion and disen-franchisement. In this paper, we (students and educators) reflect on the role of emotions and affective engagements with development, drawing upon classroom discussions as well as reading and reflection logs of those studying for a Master in International Development (MID) at the University of Western Australia. We explore how explicit efforts to be attentive to our own emotions while digesting and deliberating material for this unit allow us to better grasp our own positionality while revisiting our personal entanglements with the 'Other'-the quintessential development subject. Making space for 'more-than-rational' aspects of development enables scholars and educators to experiment with affective options for interdisciplinary teaching in a distinctly more personal way than students may expect from a postgraduate degree in international development.

This article is based on a paper presented by Karen Paiva Henrique at the Environmental Justice 2017 Conference, University of Sydney, 6-8 November 2017, and is a part of her broader PhD research. Also available at: [http://sydney.edu.au/environment-institute/blog/ej-series-part-9-landscapes-dispossession-examining-adaptation-persistent-exclusion-urban-poor/]

The ubiquity of flood events challenges designers to rethink the longstanding relationship between cities and their surrounding water bodies, (re)envisioning how the floodplain should be occupied. Contemporary proposals for residential development in the urban coast increasingly accept the inevitability of flooding, devising buildings and landscapes to make room for excess water. Building upon this idea, this article analyzes contemporary residential design for flooding focusing on the question: How are buildings and landscapes (re)defined by their relationship with the recurrent presence of water? The article draws from the systematic analysis of four case studies in the Netherlands, the United States, and the United Kingdom, exploring buildings and landscapes designed to cope with flooding through structures that are raised, buoyant and/or permeable. It uses a novel approach to the integrated analysis of architecture and landscape architecture, applying drawings as a tool for analysis. The result is a holistic understanding of design solutions produced to cope with recurrent flood events. The article elucidates how these emergent typologies engender a new relationship between architecture and landscape architecture, and between floodplain dwellers and their natural environments, through the careful composition of buildings and landscapes in relation to their fluid terrains.

The world’s climate is changing at unprecedented rates. As temperatures increase, sea level rises, and extreme weather events become more frequent, the world’s population will be increasingly affected by flooding. Rising waters already pose a considerable threat in urban areas throughout the globe, endangering coastal communities and causing millions of dollars in damage and repair. Rooted on the environmental variations caused by climate change and its impact on human populations, the paper will reflect upon two traditional measures utilized in the prevention of flooding: the implementation of hard-infrastructure projects and the relocation of populations at risk. As the paper will delineate, hard-infrastructure projects that have been applied for generations in order to control the forces of water, are currently challenged by the possibility of obsolescence. At the same time, the relocation of families to safer grounds, often defined by financial, physical and political constraints, is called into question for the consequent dismantlement of social groups and the potential abandonment of entire urban settings. Hence the paper argues in favor of a paradigm shift in architecture and planning practices from strengthening boundaries toward establishing a more fluid relationship between water and land. The inevitability of flooding urges architects to consider water as a design element, allowing it to infiltrate the land and to become part of the built environment. To this end, the study evaluates three contemporary housing responses to flooding: the “FLOAT House”, by Morphosis; the “New Aqueous City”, by nARCHITECTS; and the “Turnaround House”, by Nissen Adams LLP. These examples unveil alternative approaches to the inhabitation of floodplains, challenging traditional architectural solutions by incorporating into design the conditions of transition intrinsic to areas affected by flooding.

At the end of the 1970s, Critical Regionalism questioned the homogenization of architecture brought by modernism. The movement claimed a necessity for the mediation between ‘universal civilization’ and ‘local culture’, establishing the possibility for a meaningful yet progressive architecture to take form. In the face of a visible standardization of architecture throughout the globe, as portrayed by the reckless replication of design solutions disregarding local environmental and social conditions, the idea of Critical Regionalism seems relevant. However, the critical part of this discourse must be reframed in order to release the ‘local’ from its aesthetic form, establishing new possibilities for architecture to address its context in innovative ways. This paper examines examples of both purely aesthetic regionalism and creative solutions for addressing local issues. The study focuses on both past and contemporary Brazilian architectural solutions. Brazil currently faces a continuous increase in its construction market, but it is in past solutions that the most creative locally inspired architecture can be found. Through the examination of such examples, the paper will explore both the problems and potentials of a critical and regionalist Brazilian architecture.