Buoyant Life: Floating Urbanities Adrift in the Archipelagic Imaginary
Abstract
Against ecologically modernist calls for the building of floating cities in the name of climate-proofing littoral futures, and this work critically engages with travelling technopolitical dreams for building with or on water in rapidly submerging coastal landscapes. We ask how buoyancy serves as a metaphor and method with which to contemplate areas as relational entanglements of the urban-amphibious in archipelagic Southeast Asia(s), while drawing on exclusionary practices of municipal placemaking. Foregrounding both grandiose and small-scale projects in the globalist wet dreams of a floating infrastructural future, we illustrate how policymakers struggle to contend with their own narratives of an amphibious vernacular past, often through archipelagic riparian imaginaries that reinforce prevailing modernist terra-centric urban planning biases and readings of watery inundation.
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