Research Publications
Welcome to our research publications section. Here you can find a collection of insightful papers and reports that contribute to the advancement of knowledge in the field of urban resilience and flood risk management. Our publications cover a wide range of topics, from community-based disaster analysis to interdisciplinary approaches for addressing environmental threats.
This paper contributes an empirical study of the spatial-temporal dynamics of speculative urbanism and the associated impacts on water resources and flood events in Jakarta. The paper uses a political ecology approach to analyze mainland and offshore development including how (1) financial speculation generates flood risk and the overexploitation of water resources and (2) environmental speculation and how creates new opportunities for capital accumulation. In order to capture the full costs of speculative urbanism, it is imperative that urban scholars attend to its ecological dimensions. Moreover, an urban political ecology approach advances our understandings of speculative urbanism by illuminating its contradictions and limits.
Earth for AI: A political ecology of data-driven climate initiatives
This paper charts the emerging political economy of “climate AI”, showing that environmental and climate crises are grist for tech solutions and find that many climate AI actors are interested in it for surveillance, greenwashing, and commodifying algorithms. The paper pays special attention to how neocolonial and racialized power structures manifest in climate AI and outline three ways for political ecologists and digital geographers to research its socio-materiality: how computational resources are environmentally embedded, how disasters become “shocks” that the AI industry capitalizes on, and how climate AI shapes material investment flows and landscapes.
Subterranean infrastructures in a sinking city: the politics of visibility in Jakarta
This article analyzes why land subsidence remained unaddressed in Jakarta by exploring the politics of infrastructure in Jakarta through the lens of in/visibility. Scholarship in infrastructure studies has tended to categorize infrastructure as either hyper-visible by design, or invisible until breakdown. This study extends theoretical engagements with infrastructure by examining how visibility, aesthetics, and materiality converge to shape urban and water governance in Jakarta in fundamental ways. Spectacular, visible infrastructures generate public and political attention, while below ground, hidden and invisible infrastructures are overlooked and politically unpopular to address. This “politics of visibility” articulates with a mode of aesthetic governmentality with uneven consequences for Jakarta’s residents.