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Paper short abstract

This paper examines dike reinforcements on the island of Marken as everyday infrastructure where climate imaginaries, heritage, and polarisation intersect, showing how heritage operates as relational infrastructure shaping and mediating contested notions of safety, authority, and belonging.

Paper long abstract

Dikes are among the most everyday infrastructures of the Netherlands. Their immovable presence, silently embedded in the landscape, is easily taken for granted until they require reinforcement. Hence, in the context of climate adaptation, dikes have become increasingly contested sites where questions of safety, authority, and belonging converge.

Drawing on ethnographic research on the former island Marken, an island of 1800 residents in the Markermeer, this paper explores how dike infrastructures function as everyday sites where climate imaginaries, heritage, and polarisation intersect. While regional water authorities frame dike reinforcement as a technical response to future climate risks, residents articulate safety through lived experience, collective memory, and island heritage shaped by relations with water. These differing logics of safety do not simply coexist but actively clash in participatory processes and everyday conversations around the dike, producing mistrust and a pronounced us-and-them dynamic between residents and external experts.

I argue that the island’s heritage operates here as a form of relational infrastructure: an intangible yet powerful assemblage of memories, practices, and attachments that mediates relationships between people, landscape, water, and governing institutions. Heritage, therefore, structures how polarisation around infrastructure is produced, stabilised, and sometimes contested. By foregrounding the affective and relational dimensions of dike infrastructures, this paper contributes to anthropological debates on the infrastructural turn and demonstrates how infrastructures are not only material systems but also moral and emotional terrains. Situating dikes within everyday life reveals how polarisation is negotiated through ordinary practices, emotions, and narratives of belonging in coastal climate governance.