Disastrous Times: Beyond Environmental Crisis in Urbanizing Asia

By University of Pennsylvania Press

Across contemporary Asia, each day dawns with a new story about living in an era of profound environmental change. Rapid transformations in the landscape, society, and technology produce new conflicts that are experienced at nearly every scale of life in the region. Environmental change is marked in square kilometers or micrometers, in cities or in households, within national boundaries and beyond. These changes appear in the form of radical ruptures wrought both by spectacular catastrophes like massive floods or tsunamis and by slow tragedies like the widening epidemic of asthma or the grinding processes of land dispossession. Each of these scales and phenomena reveals what it is to live in disastrous times.

This book explores how people across Asia live through and make sense of the environmental ruptures that now shape the region and asks how we might analyze this moment of disruption and risk. Global environmental shifts such as climate change are usually linked to large-scale practices such as industrialization, urbanization, and global capitalism. Here, in contrast, contributors illustrate how understanding the practical, political, and ethical consequences of living in a moment of planetary change—or intervening in its course—requires engaging with the human-scale actions and specific policies that both shape and respond to such transformations at an everyday level. Coastal residents of routinely flooded Semarang, eco-conscious retirees in a Chinese suburb, and cyclists navigating air pollution in Kolkata each experience environmental risk and change in highly situated and specific ways; yet attending to their lived, quotidian experiences enables us to apprehend the complex processes that are profoundly changing the planet.

Contributors: Nikolaj Blichfeldt, Vivian Choi, Eli Elinoff, Jenny Elaine Goldstein, Andrew Alan Johnson, Samuel Kay, Lukas Ley, Edmund Joo Vin Oh, Malini Sur, Tyson Vaughan.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Nov 27, 2020
• ISBN: 9780812297690

Book preview

Introduction: Disastrous Times

Beyond Environmental Crisis in Urbanizing Asia

Eli Elinoff and Tyson Vaughan

Awakening

In Semarang, Indonesia, ever-increasing high tides flood the city (Ley, this volume). This tidal flooding, called rob, not only shapes the city’s physical landscape but also defines its temporal landscape. Slow and rhythmic inundation stretches planners, activists, and especially poor residents to engage with infrastructures, politics, and ecologies, actively mobilizing themselves in order to deal with a new kind of tidal flooding that defies easy solutions. Existing technical solutions and political institutions fail to adequately address the multifarious effects of rob, so residents have become intimate with the city, its infrastructures, and its changing natures. While some residents hope for large-scale solutions to these problems, others attempt to create solutions on their own by gathering evidence, learning about their neighborhoods’ infrastructures, and trying to understand unpredictable riverbanks. In the absence of state solutions, coastal residents are increasingly knowledgeable about the complex human and nonhuman ecologies that compose the interface between the river and the sea. While experts struggle to gather adequate data to inform their plans, citizens raise their homes, pump out murky water, and wade ever deeper into unknown futures. And as they do, they wonder if the tidal floods that now mark their days will be the force that pushes them to relocate or if the city and its experts will do so first.

A drained peat bog has been smoldering for weeks (Goldstein, this volume). The peat fire meanders underground for hundreds of meters, at last emerging suddenly and (seemingly) randomly in the form of thick, acrid smoke. As citizens point fingers at nearby corporate monocrop plantations and as bureaucrats blame small farmers, the fires continue unabated, releasing tons of gases and particulate matter into the atmosphere. Borne on the prevailing seasonal airflow, the smoke travels across the Strait of Malacca toward Singapore. The smoke obscures the city’s gleaming skyline, built via chains of finance and held in place by the same companies that produce palm oil from the Indonesian plantations. Nervous Singaporeans check their smartphones, keeping close tabs on the air quality in various parts of the city as they plan their days. Meanwhile, the Singaporean government blames Indonesian authorities for their inability to stop farmers from burning their fields. The trail from smoke to fire to haze follows an uncertain course that leads from massive interregional commerce to localized environmental change and then to air pollution, transboundary environmental crisis, sensory discomfort, scientific investigation, environmental outrage, haze alerts, and finally international negotiation. Fingers are pointed, blame is assigned, particulates accumulate in lungs, and injury is suffered. All the while the fires continue to smolder.

In Thailand, architects design amphibious cities in the name of a cleaner and greener future defined by living with flood. In a small tsunami-struck community of northeastern Japan, a Shinto priestess charts a course for re-mooring her neighbors once again to tradition, to each other, and to nature.

Across contemporary Asia, each day dawns with a new story about living in an era of profound environmental and sociotechnical change. Rapid transformations in the landscape and in social life produce new conflicts that are experienced at nearly every scale of life in the region. Environmental change is marked in square kilometers or micrometers, in cities or in households, and within national boundaries and beyond. These changes appear in the form of radical ruptures wrought both by spectacular catastrophes such as massive floods and tsunamis and by slow disasters (Knowles 2014) such as the widening epidemic of asthma (Fortun et al. 2013) and the grinding processes of land dispossession (Li 2014a, 2017). Each of these scales and phenomena reveal what it is to live in disastrous times.

This book explores how people across Asia live, struggle, and make sense of the sorts of environmental ruptures, fast and slow, that now shape the region. The chapters ask how we might analyze this moment of rupture and risk. How do we think about disasters that seem to occur instantaneously but actually draw from deep historical roots and structure future trajectories? How are the burdens of such ruptures distributed? What kinds of sites, stories, analytical approaches, and theoretical tools might be used to help us understand these environmental changes and conflicts? What kinds of struggles—personal, ethical, political, and environmental—flow into and out of these changes? In what specific ways are human communities set adrift by the lashing waves of near-constant environmental upheaval? How do people navigate these dangerous waters? And how might they re-moor once the waters calm?

Conceptually, we call attention to anthropogenic environmental transformations as they move across spatial and temporal scales. Of course, global environmental shifts such as climate change are linked to large-scale human practices such as industrialization, urbanization, and global capitalism. However, our chapters illustrate how understanding the intellectual, affective, ethical, political, and practical consequences of living in a moment of planetary change—or intervening in its course—requires engaging with the specific policies and human-scale actions that both shape and respond to such transformations at an everyday level. Coastal residents of routinely flooded Semarang, eco-conscious retirees in a Chinese suburb, and cyclists in polluted Kolkata each experience environmental risk and change in highly situated and specific ways, yet attending to their lived quotidian experiences enables us to make sense of the complex processes that are profoundly changing the planet.

This volume argues that coming to grips with the stakes of living in these tumultuous times requires examining the ways that microscale quotidian practices and macroscale environmental changes mutually produce and influence each other (cf. Hecht 2018). We aim to open up new avenues for intervention and debate in the service of imagining alternative arrangements of humans and nature. By engaging cross-cutting scales and tempos and temporalities of disaster and risk in Asia, we aim to apprehend and reimagine environmental politics in this historic moment of epochal planetary change.

Situating

Asia’s urban transition comprises the terrain for our analysis. Nowhere else more visibly and emphatically exemplifies the sociotechnical density, emergent knowledge production, and rapidity of contemporary environmental transformation than Asian cities and their hinterlands. The cities of East, South, and Southeast Asia are growing at meteoric rates, radically reordering the hinterlands around them (Jones and Douglass 2008). Sites such as those described in the above vignettes represent distinctive yet apt exemplars of the radical sorts of environmental change now taking place (Douglass 2000). In communities throughout this superregion, people are rearranging built and natural environments even as environments are rearranging people in countless locally specific ways. Rapidly changing Asian societies and booming Asian cities make visible the deepening entanglements of human activities and natural processes at all scales. Asia’s urban transition is both a consequence and a crucible of the Anthropocene (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000).

The word Anthropocene (meaning the age of humans) is now a widely circulating term that refers to the contemporary geological epoch in which humans have become geophysically significant actors whose activities are leaving a permanently legible mark in the sedimentary record of the planet. The term is contested within both geology (whether or not it adequately reflects our current planetary geological epoch) and the social sciences (whether or not the term anthropos adequately reflects the highly uneven historical processes—chiefly colonialism, capitalism, and military domination—behind the contemporary environmental condition).¹ Although we share many of the social scientific concerns about the doubly contentious term Anthropocene, we argue that the Anthropocene framing offers a critically important launching point for debating the increasingly volatile interrelationships between humans and their environments on a planetary scale. Yet as we describe below, stopping at the Anthropocene is not enough. The term offers limited conceptual purchase for understanding the uneven sociopolitical and economic forces behind our planet’s rapid transformation. Anthropocene also does little to attend to the multiple trajectories, histories, contestations, and scenes in which the planet is being acted upon and through.

Despite the widespread discourse about environmental degradation in Asia as a space of investigation or a scene for considering ongoing efforts to live, act, debate, and make sense of environmental change, the region is often left out of the conversation altogether. As Amitav Ghosh points out with respect to strategies for responding to climate change, The brute fact is that no strategy can work globally unless it works in Asia, and yet, the conditions that are peculiar to mainland Asia are often absent from the discussion (2016, 90). Mark Hudson (2014) has argued that Asian studies (and perhaps area studies more broadly) might contribute to our understanding of environmental change in the Anthropocene by unveiling the region’s distinctive ideas of nature, considering its alternative histories of environmental extraction, and locating its discursive excursions toward sustainable futures. Yet as Tim Oakes (2017, 405) has noted, there is an endemic tension to such a project, highlighting how focusing on Asia per se requires thinking within and moving beyond area studies. Indeed, this tension is fundamental to our moment of planetary change: even as the planet is conceptualized as an interconnected ecological system, different historical trajectories and contemporary struggles matter more than ever.

Here, the value of Asia as a research site—or, more precisely, an array of sites—is not that it serves as a comparison case to the presumed baseline of the West but rather that engaging with its distinct trajectories might chart our way toward a clearer understanding of our shared present condition and also perhaps toward better futures. In taking up this charge, we follow not only Hudson and Ghosh but also a long tradition of scholars such as Edward Said (1978), Yoshimi Takeuchi (2005), and Kuan-Hsing Chen (2010, 2012) in championing the study of Asian societies on their own terms. Considering environmental changes from within and across Asia provides a pivotal empirical perspective, while attending to Asian locales on their own terms is methodologically critical for understanding global environmental transformation.

Asian urbanism does not reflect a singular modernity that is finally arriving in Asia; instead, urbanism in Asia enacts a diverse, entangled set of historical trajectories in multiple distinct sites across the region. This means that the lessons to be drawn from the galaxy of Asian experiences are not merely variations on a theme of modernity pioneered in the West. Studying their particular environmental and political struggles enables us to learn from their specific modes of knowing and engaging with risks and realities, ultimately offering new opportunities for thinking through global futures.

Though each site explored in this book is culturally and historically distinct, collectively the sites share a great deal. As Prasenjit Duara (2014) points out, Asian circulatory histories both entail and exceed contemporary national boundaries. Many places have witnessed eras of ancient empires, revolved about the Middle Kingdom, and endured European colonialism, Japanese imperialism, and the Cold War. In the postwar postcolonial era more than a few have experimented with hybrid governing regimes of authoritarian capitalism, rushing headlong into their own hyperkinetic growth-driven form of late industrialism that continues to propel environmental change in the putative name of prosperity.

From China to Indonesia to Thailand, one of the most striking shared characteristics of these societies is the astounding rate and scale of urban and industrial growth. Indeed, the effects of urbanization exceed the spatial boundaries that typically mark urban agglomerations as the city. Our volume follows scholars such as Cronon (1991), McGee (1991), Jones (1997), Brenner and Schmid (2014), and Miller and Douglass (2018) in considering the radical and often distant effects of urbanization. In Brenner and Schmid’s conception of planetary urbanism, urbanization assumes both concentrated and extended forms. Cities, in this view, are examples of concentrated urban spaces, but urban processes themselves are visible well beyond the boundaries of the city, remaking spaces considered rural and even wild. Brenner and Schmid argue that these extended forms of urbanization exemplify the kinds of forces and spaces that contemporary modes of capitalism produce. Cronon’s notion of city and country and Miller and Douglass’s concept of the urban-rural matrix echo this idea, as they both argue that spaces reformulate themselves in relation to one another. Thus, it is impossible to fully understand emerging urbanisms without considering the transformations occurring well beyond the city.

Across Asia, the endemic contradictions of mass urban expansion and environmental change are being worked out on a daily basis as construction and urbanization quicken, increasingly partitioning hostile from putatively safe spaces even as many such divisions become ever more porous. Solutions beget problems, and promise begets risk (Beck 1992); sickness, pollution, and disaster are the devilish shadows of wealth, comfort, and convenience. Yet, the distribution of value and injury has been deeply unequal. As demographer Gavin Jones (1997) has argued, the fact that most residents of Southeast Asia are now engaged in some form of urban production has provoked new kinds of precarity, self-scrutiny, and political mobilization that challenge established norms of meaning making as people struggle to make sense of reordered spatial and social terrains (cf. Bunnell 2002; Thompson 2004; Elinoff 2012; Karis 2013; Gillen 2016). The closure of the land frontier across Southeast Asia produced new vulnerabilities and intense struggles over the environment as common pooled resources became defined by a variety of forms of tenure that promoted a range of new exclusions (Hall, Hirsch, and Li 2011; Li 2014b). In the process, the lives of residents have been reorganized around temporary and permanent migration and the production of new regimes of precarious labor such as those associated with the palm oil industry (Li 2017).

As Asian populations grow and move, settling in ever-expanding urban areas exposed to more environmental hazards, the hazards themselves become more ruinous. Earth’s atmosphere and hydrosphere become hotter, less predictable, and more hostile, while industrial activities and technological development continually produce newer and ever more potent dangers. Infrastructures designed to manage urban metabolisms become taxed, transforming into sites of latent threat (Fortun 2014; see also Fortun 2001) and political struggle (Anand 2011; Simone 2017). Infrastructures are also reimagined as experiments to rethink human relations, such as reimagining nature as a means of flood mitigation (Jensen and Morita 2017; Morita 2015; see also Ley, this volume). In short, living in Asia increasingly means living with the surging risks of technogenic, natural, and compound disasters—risks that all too often are tied to one’s subject position in the social order—and constantly questioning, rethinking, and reimagining both the positive and negative possibilities inherent in technology.

Indeed, Asian societies have borne the brunt of so-called environmental disasters in recent decades as measured in numbers of both disasters and victims (Miller and Douglass 2015, 2016; Douglass 2016). As the chapters in this volume show, many communities across Asia have become intimately familiar with risk and catastrophe. Even when not coping directly with an ongoing disaster’s impacts, many Asian communities are now engaged in some form of predisaster preparation or postdisaster recovery. Arguably, because disasters have become so frequent, there is no longer a meaningful distinction between the phases of the disaster cycle. At the same time, some actors invoke either the memory or the threat of catastrophe to justify their own agendas, projects, and policies. Housing relocation, floodwall construction, urban infrastructure development, and similar projects transform social relations, exacerbate inequalities, and generate fierce political struggles. Thus, both the lived and the represented experiences of disaster and disruption in urbanizing Asia are fundamentally normalized, routinized, and quotidian.

Disrupting

The normalization of rupture across the region is provoking fresh and poignant debates about the interrelationships between humans, sociotechnical systems, and biophysical landscapes. Such discourses radically challenge governments, experts, and citizens alike, prompting them to imagine life anew in this time of disruption and transformation. Disasters spark debates and controversies as they reveal long-hidden fault lines in sociotechnical infrastructures and environments, making them potent analytical levers and fecund research sites as well as focal points of opportunity for political activism and intervention.

Yet even as we demonstrate how critical pre- and postdisaster politics are, we resist the temptation to employ crisis as a generic hermeneutic for making sense of profound transformation. Crisis talk often presupposes a forensic approach to a particular problem; by rooting out the causes of a particular issue, it becomes possible to locate the moment of deviation from a particular, albeit mythical, norm (Roitman 2013). As Masco (2017, S73) puts it, Crisis talk seeks to stabilize an institution, practice or reality rather than interrogate the historical conditions of possibility for that endanger-ment to occur. In our moment, crisis blocks thought by evoking the need for an emergency response to the potential loss of a status quo, emphasizing urgency and restoration over a review of first principles and historical ontologies. Instead, our chapters aim to reconceptualize our thinking away from crisis toward specific local political struggles with the potential to yield futures more full of possibility than such crisis thinking might imply. Thus, we consider the region’s cascading environmental shifts not to reproduce crisis logics but instead to think against them.

By engaging with scenes of rupture, both realized and imminent, from across Asia’s urban transition, we examine disasters at various scales, tempos, and rhythms in order to understand the ways that such events and processes become crucibles in which particular practices, norms, or forms of power are stabilized or disrupted. Doing so allows us to explore the multiple ways that the region’s actors are grappling with the problems of governing and living with environmental risk and disaster. Their approaches do not just draw from distinct historical roots but also draw out complex future trajectories.

We are compelled by Donna Haraway’s mobilization of trouble as a practice and focal point in times of ecological devastation: Our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle the troubled waters and rebuild quiet places (2016, 1). Our authors both make trouble and follow the trouble in their own sites. They do so by taking us into quotidian scenes where everyday struggles become opportunities to challenge inequitable power relations and reconfigure communal and individual relationships to the larger planet. Likewise, we characterize ecologies and infrastructures as contested sites in the making, contentious spaces that draw together economies, practices of dwelling, modes of governing, and practices of politics (Rademacher and Sivaramakrisnan 2013, 2017; see also Appel, Anand, and Gupta 2018).

In contrast to the trope that Asia and its cities have become a kind of metonym for environmental crises and vulnerability (Bankoff 2001),² this volume functions as its own ecology of comparisons (Choy 2011) that considers the varied forces driving environmental change in Asia and the variety of responses to the troubles that have ensued from the region’s mass urbanization. The chapters, both individually and when brought into relation with one another, show the ways in which a variety of actors across the region are deeply engaged with difficult questions about how to live on a changing planet. In this way, the book begins to unearth the roots of the forces driving such changes. Moreover, the chapters tell the stories of the intense struggles taking place within the region as both citizens and governments recalibrate their practices and imaginaries in relation to growing risks and deeply uncertain futures. Thus, we seek to disrupt simplistic portrayals of a region in crisis and attend closely to the ways in which disaster and Asian urbanism and their disruptive environmental effects have evoked new practices, struggles, and questions about knowing, governing, and living in a time of profound environmental transformation.

Knowing

One of the most important contributions these chapters offer is in exploring the uncertain and unstable relationship between different and related ways of knowing and ways of governing environmental change. The Anthropocene raises epistemological and ontological questions that challenge dominant modes of knowing and engaging the world. Many authors in the collection note the importance of the senses (e.g., Choi, Johnson, Elinoff, and Blichfeldt), while others emphasize the ways that technoscientific modes of knowledge production may be no more efficacious than alternative ways of knowing (Vaughan, Kay, and Goldstein). The chapters demonstrate these turns in part and whole, showing how scholars might reinterpret anthropocenic data and also how the kinds of changes associated with the Anthropocene may, for example, privilege sense over science—or vice versa. Moreover, as numerous scholars (e.g., Morton 2013; Whitington 2013, 2016; Latour 2014) have pointed out, scientific ways of knowing often produce more complex frameworks of understanding rather than actually making the world more comprehensible.

Scholars of science and technology have shown that objective technoscientific ways of engaging, understanding, and representing the world are no less entangled in political ecologies, no less rooted in particular cultural and historical contexts, and in many ways no less embodied, affective, or sensual than other ways of knowing (see, e.g., Collins 1985; Shapin and Schaffer 1985; Harding 1986; Latour and Woolgar 1986; Lynch 1993; Shapin 1994; Lock 2001; Warwick 2003; Mol 2002; Raj 2006; Daston and Galison 2007; Otsuki et al. 2019). Still, the authority of science is often invoked to underwrite purely technical (and thus putatively apolitical) state-sponsored programs of social and environmental governance—a mode of depoliticization that Li (2007) calls rendering technical (cf. Jasanoff 1998, 2003; Hilgartner 2000; Mitchell 2002; Oh, this volume; Elinoff, this volume).

Nevertheless, as these chapters show, both sensory and scientific ways of knowing turn out to be crucial to questions about how to govern rapidly changing environments. In practice, they are imbricated, continuous, and mutually constitutive (Collins 1985; Latour and Woolgar 1986). Local, embodied approaches to apprehending the environment may prompt new scientific studies (Brown 1987, 1990); they may contribute directly or indirectly to scientific knowledge, as citizen science, local wisdom, and community knowledge offer grounds for emerging technoscientific and governmental practices (Agrawal 1995; White 1995; Epstein 1996; Vaughan 2014; Lewenstein 2016). Yet these diverse ways of knowing are neither politically equal nor epistemologically equivalent. Moreover, both scientific and sensory approaches to apprehending the changing environment often produce more, not less, contestation. Though the specifics of the cases described here and elsewhere may vary, the manifold uncertainties of these anthropocenics in this moment call upon scholars to consider the epistemological chains that provide justification for new governmental interventions, raising the questions of what knowledge counts in governance and in politics, how it is made to count, and for what purposes.³

Certain kinds of knowing and certain knowers become privileged, while other ways of acting and knowing are ignored or rendered unintelligible and thus unactionable, unable to govern or to be governed on their own terms.⁴ In this way, sense, science, and governance intertwine and unfold in complex and uncertain ways in the Anthropocene. Embodied senses are essential to the ways in which people identify and imagine environmental change. The senses condition the ways that people distinguish the normal from the abnormal. Moreover, sensual claims not only help people grasp these changes but often become the basis for broader sociopolitical projects. Our authors show that the relationships between ways of feeling, ways of knowing, and ways of acting are subtle, complex, and thoroughly political.

Samuel Kay’s chapter takes us to Beijing, China, where knowledge about nanoparticulate air pollution is coproduced with the regime for urban atmospheric governance. In spite of the visible and bodily felt presence of PM2.5 pollution, the government long chose not to see or acknowledge it until forced to do so by considerations of the 2008 Summer Olympics and the potential for damaging international press. Since then, monitoring has expanded, first by alternative actors such as the U.S. embassy and then by the Chinese government itself. State narratives about pollution, Kay tells us, emphasize technoscientific knowledge, while consumer markets highlight self-responsibility through virtuous consumption. Thus, small-particle pollution becomes a problem for architects, developers, and designers who must construct buildings to adapt to the presence of these micro- and nanoscopic particles and for consumers who must make good choices about their own health. The result is the production of highly uneven engagements with pollution while also, as Kay points out, sorting people into categories of knowledgeable/adapting and ignorant/nonadapting citizens. These categories say more about the inequitable distribution of harm and injury through the atmosphere than they do about the behaviors of actual inhabitants. Moreover, they exclude an even larger number of citizens for whom adaptation is beyond reach. Here, sense, science, and law work together to redistribute injury and responsibility without disrupting the material or political contributors to small-particle air pollution.

Lukas Ley shows how residents of Semarang, Indonesia, must relearn the local ecologies of that city for a new era of danger associated with sea-level rise and tidal flooding. Historically, Ley argues, flooding began with a major river normalization project in the 1990s that, alongside industrialization, transformed the catchment surface accelerating subsidence. Increasing sea levels and the effects of the sinking city have made tidal flooding, or rob, a major problem. In the midst of rising waters, residents have embarked on new projects of knowing their ecologies to understand the ways that riverbanks distribute water and risk. Residents have learned about where and how infrastructures are likely to fail and have attempted to devise collective solutions. Individually, many residents seek to shore up their own homes. These efforts reflect how the poor have begun to create and act on new ecological knowledge at an intimate scale. This process takes into account the complex and uncertain interactions between urban surfaces and tidal floods. Residents learn to read variations in the water level and determine the ways in which such variations will affect their local infrastructures. As Ley shows, these efforts to live within emerging and unpredictable conditions have inspired new kinds of knowledge production that links actors into new kinds of collective engagements with their changing environment.

Both Kay and Ley demonstrate that apprehending the Anthropocene prompts questions about situated epistemologies and alternative ways of knowing. Who makes claims to knowledge about the changing world and how those claims are constructed and underwritten are questions upon which a great deal of political action hinges. As all of our authors show, sense, science, and governance are enchained in unstable and contentious relationships that often lead to the creation of new terms and modalities of governance and lay the grounds for new sorts of political