Table Of ContentDisastrous Times
CRITICAL STUDIES IN RISK AND DISASTER
Kim Fortun and Scott Gabriel Knowles, Series Editors
Critical Studies in Risk and Disaster explores how environmental, technological,
and health risks are created, managed, and analyzed in different contexts.
Global in scope and drawing on perspectives from multiple disciplines, volumes
in the series examine the ways that planning, science, and technology are
implicated in disasters. The series also engages public policy formation—including
analysis of science, technology, and environmental policy as well as welfare,
conflict resolution, and economic policy developments where relevant.
DISASTROUS TIMES
Beyond Environmental Crisis in Urbanizing Asia
Edited by
Eli Elinoff
and Tyson Vaughan
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
PHILADELPHIA
Copyright © 2021 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for
purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book
may be reproduced in any form by any means without
written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104- 4112
www .upenn .edu /pennpress
Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Elinoff, Eli, editor. | Vaughan, Tyson, editor.
Title: Disastrous times : beyond environmental crisis in urbanizing Asia / edited by
Eli Elinoff and Tyson Vaughan.
Other titles: Critical studies in risk and disaster.
Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2021] |
Series: Critical studies in risk and disaster | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020022811 | ISBN 978-0-8122-5270-5 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Environmental disasters—Social aspects—Asia. | Environmental
disasters—Government policy—Asia. | Urbanization—Environmental aspects—
Asia. | Asia—Environmental conditions—21st century.
Classification: LCC GE160.A78 D47 2021 | DDC 363.34/561095—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020022811p
CONTENTS
Introduction. Disastrous Times: Beyond Environmental
Crisis in Urbanizing Asia 1
Eli Elinoff and Tyson Vaughan
Chapter 1. Breathing in Beijing: Governing Particles
and People in Urban China 25
Samuel Kay
Chapter 2. Figuring (Out) the Sinking City: Tidal Floods
and Urban Subsidence in Semarang, Indonesia 46
Lukas Ley
Chapter 3. Ambient Air: Kolkata’s Bicycle Politics
and Postcarbon Futures 65
Malini Sur
Chapter 4. Infrastructures of Feeling: The Sense and Governance
of Disasters in Sri Lanka 83
Vivian Choi
Chapter 5. Lots of Smoke, but Where’s the Fire?
Contested Causality and Shifting Blame
in the Southeast Asian Haze Crisis 102
Jenny Elaine Goldstein
Chapter 6. Reimagining the Natures of State: The Rise of
Fisheries Co- management in Vietnam 121
Edmund Joo Vin Oh
vi Contents
Chapter 7. The New, Accidental Gods: Engaging with the Spirits
of Disaster in Bangkok 141
Andrew Alan Johnson
Chapter 8. The Unspectacular Spectacle of Low- Carbon Life:
Climate Change and Self Governing
in an Urban Community in China 154
Nikolaj Blichfeldt
Chapter 9. Drawing the Future: Urban Imaginaries
After the 2011 Thai Floods 172
Eli Elinoff
Chapter 10. Re- mooring: Rethinking Recovery
and Resilience in the Anthropocene 196
Tyson Vaughan
List of Contributors 215
Index 217
Acknowledgments 227
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 inun-
dation 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 ad-
dress 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-s cale solutions to these problems, others attempt to create so-
lutions on their own by gathering evidence, learning about their neighbor-
hoods’ infrastructures, and trying to understand unpredictable riverbanks.
In the absence of state solutions, coastal residents are increasingly knowl-
edgeable 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 vol-
ume). 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
2 Eli Elinoff and Tyson Vaughan
and as bureaucrats blame small farmers, the fires continue unabated, releas-
ing 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 burn-
ing their fields. The trail from smoke to fire to haze follows an uncertain
course that leads from massive interregional commerce to localized envi-
ronmental 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 Shintō 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 liv-
ing 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. Environmen-
tal change is marked in square kilometers or micrometers, in cities or in
households, and within national boundaries and beyond. These changes ap-
pear in the form of radical ruptures wrought both by spectacular catastro-
phes 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 re-
gion. 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 trajecto-
ries? How are the burdens of such ruptures distributed? What kinds of sites,
stories, analytical approaches, and theoretical tools might be used to help
Introduction: Disastrous Times 3
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 trans-
formations 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 capital-
ism. 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 cy-
clists 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 pro-
foundly 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 in-
fluence each other (cf. Hecht 2018). We aim to open up new avenues for inter-
vention and debate in the service of imagining alternative arrangements of
humans and nature. By engaging cross- cutting scales and tempos and tem-
poralities 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, emer-
gent 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
