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Urban resilience projects aim to combat climate risks. But what are the broader impacts?

31 October 2022

World Cities Day is on 31 October 2022

Dr Sophie Webber from the School of Geosciences explains her research into big infrastructure projects built or underway in Jakarta in response to climate change.

Dr Sophie Webber is a human geographer in the School of Geosciences who researches urban governance and the political economies of climate change, focused on Southeast Asia and the Pacific. In 2021, she secured an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) to investigate the varied impacts of urban protective infrastructure in the face of climate change, with Indonesia as a case study.

For World Cities Day (31 October 2022), SSEAC spoke with Sophie about her ongoing research, which centers on Jakarta, and the related work of her PhD students.

Tell us about your current research on urban resilience in Indonesia.

As part of my DECRA, I’m looking at big infrastructure projects that are being built to protect cities from the impacts of climate change. In Jakarta, examples of this include flood protection infrastructure such as sea walls and dams, but other big infrastructure being built in and around Jakarta includes new roads, train systems, and so on. I’m mostly focused on infrastructure along rivers in Jakarta, which aims to increase their resilience to more variable rainfall and storms, as well as sea walls. I’m trying to understand the economies that underpin this infrastructure, and what some of the effects of climate change are on those economies.

There are all these possible negative social, ecological, and economic effects of infrastructure. For example, it might protect the community in one place but have negative impacts upstream. Or when infrastructure is built, communities may be evicted, which has happened a lot in Jakarta. I’m trying to conceptualise this research in terms of a kind of commodity chain of infrastructure. The end product might be the infrastructure itself but before that are a whole series of different inputs and material transformations, markets, labour regulations, policy actors, and so on.

What are you expecting to uncover?

I’m really trying to be very open-minded about what I might find. Ultimately, I’m trying to look more broadly at what the impact of big infrastructure is for urban resilience, about what some of the perversities and contradictions of that might be. Urban resilience is often assumed to adhere to an urban system, but I’m trying to zoom out and think about what kinds of resources, labour, markets and financing are necessary to build that urban resilience. This takes us well beyond the limits of the city itself, and which might highlight the potentially negative impacts on communities and ecosystems outside the city.

Sophie Webber in Jakarta — Sophie Webber at a sea wall built in Kampung Akuarium in north Jakarta.

You’ve previously written about the ‘global urban resilience complex’. What is this and how does it play out?

One of the ways urban researchers and geographers like myself think about cities is in terms of their connections with global processes and networks. With that concept of the urban resilience complex, colleagues and I were trying to describe the kind of industry producing urban resilience that is globally interconnected and engages with cities in particular ways. About 10 years ago, some powerful actors helped shape urban resilience into a fairly narrow, but globalising form, with processes, methods, diagnostic tools and a specific set of responses, produced and circulated by global experts, and implemented on top of existing plans in cities. This was a kind of industry which engaged a whole series of actors in opportunistic and financialised ways to institute a particular program of urban resilience.

Some of the work I did in Jakarta was trying to understand how this global complex is articulated locally and how it interacts with urban governance programs and processes in Jakarta itself. The understanding of global policy elites might be that these packages of urban resilience seamlessly flow around the world and can just be stamped on top of entrepreneurial or neoliberal cities. I think what happened in Jakarta was quite different to that, where local policy elites reinterpreted these global programs to fit their own local objectives, but not necessarily in progressive ways.

You’re currently supervising several PhD students here at Sydney. What research are they involved in?

Wahyu Astuti just started her research earlier this year. She is researching water infrastructure in Jakarta and looking at the ways a variety of different actors speculate upon water infrastructure for different gains. On the one hand, there are policy and financial elites who are building a whole series of dams and conveyance systems around the edges of Jakarta to try to provide some level of flood protection, as well as increase access to fresh water. But there are also communities being displaced by that infrastructure, and Wahyu is exploring how they position themselves in relation to this infrastructure that has forced them from their homes and communities, with a focus on how it may offer different opportunities that they use for their own gain.

Another student, Chieh-ming Lai, has been researching urban greening programs in Bangkok, and the new techniques to improve treescapes in the city. He has just finished writing his thesis, which is really exciting. He is interested in the global policy networks that facilitate the transfer of new ideas and techniques for how greening might be improved and explores the interaction between these global flows of policy and what happens when they meet the materiality of the city and the landscapes themselves. His research has looked at what he calls inbound learning and outbound learning about the city, and how this interacts with the rhythms of daily life in Bangkok, different work practices, and so on.