Paper short abstract:

Urban coastlines have seen a turn towards nature as infrastructure, as hard defenses fail. I argue that this masks underlying functioning of humans as infrastructure that better explains vulnerability, opportunity, and habitability at the coast.

Paper long abstract:

Urban coastlines around the world have seen hard infrastructures failing, as sea levels rise, storms worsen, and sea walls deteriorate or collapse. One response has been the turn to nature-based solutions in the management of watery boundaries. This can involve the planting of mangroves and seagrasses, or letting salt water breach elsewhere to form new marshes and wetlands in attempts to relieve pressure. While research on the infrastructuring of nature is valuable, it has at times overlooked the precarious and ephemeral processes of urban coastal boundary making. This is especially the case given the uncertainty over future coastlines that makes intertidal planting highly speculative, with potentially increasing turbidity, eutrophication, ocean warming and acidification, as well as processes of coastal squeeze. In this context, green-blue infrastructures can seem as likely to fail as their harder counterparts.

In this presentation I argue that the turn towards green-blue infrastructure at the urban coast masks the underlying functioning of humans as infrastructure, in which vulnerability, opportunity and habitability continue through changes from concrete to plants. People make the coastline through improvisatory and adaptive practices, of which contemporary participation in nature-based infrastructural projects is just one part. At the same time, recognising humans as infrastructure can cast new light on ambivalent and partial participation in nature-based projects, where a politics of habitability rubs against expectations of future failing. This presentation draws on 18 months of ethnographic research on the south coast of England, as well as comparative preparation for research on the coast of Guyana.