Resilience Imaginaries: Politics of Coastal Engineering and Design in New York

• In Event: The Politics of Adaptation Governance: Emerging Sub-National Challenges

Abstract

The unfolding of the Anthropocene sparks collective imagination about desirable futures, shared fears, and visions of social progress; in turn shaping practices of governing. This paper traces how a global discourse of resilience functions as orientation for practitioners in the Anthropocene dealing with the fall out of climate change. The paper depicts the practices through which physical spaces and social organization are rendered in novel ways, comparing two accounts of coastal resilience creation in NYC. One aims attention at the United States Army Corps of Engineers and one on design professionals. I describe their designs of shoreline interventions in the name of resilience, chronicling the interplay between research practices, legal and regulatory discourse, and design practices, ultimately detailing the multiplicity of the resilience imaginary and the global politics of its materialization. I argue that institutional histories, epistemic cultures, and legal and regulatory circumstances shape the possible meanings and materialities coastal resilience can take in practice on the one hand; and that the imaginaries produced and visualized simultaneously challenge these histories, cultures, and circumstances by recalibrating what kinds of futures are thought probable, possible, and preferable on the other.

Author

• Katinka Wijsman