Organizer: East-West Center 

Lecture Series: EWC Insights: Asia-Pacific Transitions

Description:

Greater Jakarta – one of the largest urban regions in the world – is notorious for its perennial flooding. A city with extreme inequality, Jakarta is a melting pot of the fourth largest country by population in the world and embodies the political economy of development and change for Indonesia. Drawing from geospatial analysis, policy engagement, and sustained ethnographic work since 2007, inundated extends our understanding of Greater Jakarta beyond flooding to re-situate development dilemmas across the region. This presentation begins with an analysis of the biophysical dimensions of flooding, connecting them with spatial plans, while also centering perspectives from the city’s riverbanks of eviction and relocation. More broadly, intensifying floods from climate change, severe land subsidence, water insecurity, and other development challenges have accelerated plans to move the political capital of Indonesia to East Kalimantan, a resource frontier most known for its forests and coal mines. Already set in motion, such plans present new trajectories for Indonesia’s future, with persistent vulnerabilities in Greater Jakarta that also raise new forms of precarity and opportunity elsewhere. 

Speaker:  

Micah R. Fisher is a Fellow in the Research Program at the East-West Center. He conducts research on the human-dimensions of environmental change such as deforestation, urbanization, and disasters in the Indo-Pacific region. He is an affiliate graduate faculty at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa Department of Urban and Regional Planning and is a senior lecturer at the Hasanuddin University Department of Forestry in Indonesia. He currently serves as co-Editor in Chief for the academic peer-reviewed journal Forest and Society. He has also previously worked with the World Bank on water insecurity, the Center for International Forestry Research on land rights and tenure, and with Mercy Corps and various other international development organizations on disaster management.

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