Abstract
In 2018, the Netherlands Enterprise Agency kicked off Water as Leverage, a program aiming to bring water-based solutions to address climate and urban risk in three Southeast Asian cities: Chennai, Khulna, and Semarang. The ‘ONE Resilient Semarang’ team - a group of designers, engineers, economists, ecologists, art activists, and academics - was tasked with developing design-driven, bankable project ideas following an initial phase of research, analysis, stakeholder engagement, and on-the-ground coalition-building with agencies and institutions. In this presentation, members of four partnered organizations on ONE Resilient Team (One Architecture & Urbanism, Kota Kita, Deltares, and Wetlands International) will bring multidisciplinary perspectives to Semarang’s current catch-22: it is a city economically dependent on the same extractive coastal industries that exacerbate its subsidence and flood risk, projected for even more drastic urban densification and economic expansion in the coming years. Instead of developing one-off infrastructure proposals for the city, ONE Resilient Team instead chose a more holistic approach centered around a widespread reorientation of water use across the entire city, from coast to upland, from Kendal to Demak - altogether comprised of potentially hundreds of projects. The embedded goal is to address challenges in a programmatic manner, potentially sparking transformational, bottom-up and top-down change in processes and governance. With the combined disciplines of urban design, community-based planning, water / coastal engineering, and ecological restoration, ONE Resilient Team’s conceptual proposal aims to find integrated solutions to the combined water related risks of climate change and socio-economic growth by drawing from expertise across sectors and backgrounds from across the globe. This presentation will seek to address these issues through the prism of four disciplines among many more represented within the team, asking how resilience can operate beyond an individual project as a guiding development principle for climate-vulnerable cities and landscapes.
