The two-year funded project brings together academics, artist, water justice activists, and citizen scientists from Berlin, Brazil and Indonesia to collectively produce and share knowledge for more healthy future urban environments. To this end, the project builds solidarites between the cities by sharing experiences and know-how on urban waters struggles and their more-than-only-human riparian communities.
Urban rivers in cities like Jakarta, São Paulo, and Berlin have long functioned as arteries for transporting extracted resources, becoming open veins of industrial pollution. In this way, canalised waters and their aquatic ecosystems evidence the legacies of urban expansion, colonial extraction and changing climates. Meanwhile, collectives in these cities are experimenting with novel ways to live with the degraded urban waters by generating new knowledges and devices for “planetary healing” (Escobar, 2022). However, such self-organised urban grassroots communities dealing with conflicts around water and climate tend to be precarious, often operating in isolation from one another in different locations.
To overcome this remoteness and build new forms of transdisciplinary knowledge between diverse sites across the global South and North, our project connects three urban riparian communities and a scientific urban lab in new ways. To deliver this transdisciplinary aspiration, we designed and developed what we call a “self-organised infrastructure” (Baxter 2022) which circulates material knowledge – that is, diverse ways of knowing inscribed in material objects and artefacts.
These material knowledges include collaborative water quality testing devices from Labtek Apung in Jakarta; counter-mapping practices from Ground Atlas in São Paulo; experimental forms of multispecies cohabitation at Floating University in Berlin, and; urban design and research practices from the BUA funded lab: Planetary Tactics for Cohabitation (Grand Challenge Global Health project: “Re-Scaling Global Health. Human Health and Multispecies Cohabitation on an Urban Planet”).
This is a collaborative project with a diverse and wide network of both academic and practice-based actors across the Global South and North co-ordinated by Laura Kemmer and Jamie-Scott Baxter funded by the Berlin University Alliance and the Swiss National Science Foundation.
References
Baxter, J-S. (2023): Self-organised/ing Infrastructures. Understanding everyday practices of spread and resistance in processes of socio-spatial change on the periphery. Multi-sited ethnographies in rural Portugal and Austria. Technische Universität Berlin . https://doi.org/10.14279/depositonce-17730
Escobar, A. (2022): On the Ontological Metrofitting of Cities. e-flux Architecture, July 2022.
Salve Saracura
São Paulo
Floating
Berlin
Labtek Apung
Jakarta
