Short abstract:

As oceans rise worldwide, many governments are intensifying infrastructural efforts to defend the towns and cities bordering them. This paper considers the politics of protective infrastructure in Japan, arguing that “safety infrastructures” can undermine social worlds and intensify other crises.

Long abstract:

As oceans rise worldwide, many governments are intensifying infrastructural efforts to defend the towns and cities bordering them. Such efforts depend on increasingly complex ways of modeling, anticipating, and speaking for future crises. In northeastern Japan, for example, the tsunami of 2011 prompted disaster scientists to revise how they modeled the potential frequency and characteristics of earthquakes and tsunamis. Some argued that their revised models demonstrated the need for new, more comprehensive infrastructures protecting people and property. They proposed a “total system” of protective infrastructure incorporating both structural and non-structural elements, dividing sea from society and managing the former’s ingress through complex systems of seawalls, dikes, and canals. However, residents argued that this system would intensify other crises, such as biodiversity loss and depopulation. Building on fieldwork with coastal residents, and comparative case studies, this paper considers the politics of protective infrastructure efforts in waterfront areas. By examining conflicts between scientists, officials implementing the system, and tsunami survivors, it explores a paradox at the heart of efforts to infrastructure coastal “edges”: how divisive “safety infrastructures” can undermine the very objects—social worlds—they claim to protect. It argues that such modernist attempts to “hold the line” against the sea—or fortify the line further—are ill-suited to a time when addressing the permacrisis requires breaking down the borders between humans and non-humans, both materially and conceptually.