Transformations of Urban Coastal Nature(s): Meanings and Paradoxes of Nature-Based Solutions for Climate Adaptation in Southeast Asia

Abstract

Significance StatementThis chapter puts into conversation two distinct yet interrelated planning visions – Blue Urbanism as a movement in its own right. driven by the overarching promise of more meaningfully reconnecting coastal cities with their marine ecosystems, and Nature-based solutions, with roots in engineering that encompass a broad range of conservationist and infrastructural interventions rooted in Euro-American sensibilities around (urban) nature. Drawing on urban Southeast Asia for inspiration, namely Jakarta, Metro Manila and Singapore, the chapter unpicks dominant understandings of “nature” within its concomitant planning paradigms. Particular attention is placed on divergent meanings and contradictions that underpin how urban coastal nature(s) are materially imagined, reproduced and contested through often technical means, utilitarian value-systems, and modes of governing adaptation in its broadest sense.