This seminar is part of the Climate Cookies & Coffee series of the Belgian Climate Centre. This is a new seminar series launched by the Belgian Climate Centre to foster knowledge-sharing, collaboration, and interdisciplinary discussion among climate researchers.
For this edition, the Belgian Climate Centre will welcome Anna Elisabeth Kuijpers (LAMC ULB) with a presentation on "The Hidden Dangers of Innocent Infrastructures during the Flood of 2021".
During the flood that hit Belgium and the Netherlands in July 2021, grey and green infrastructures transformed from seemingly innocent bystanders into dangerous, sometimes even life-threatening elements. In this presentation, I deal with the transformative process that such innocent infrastructures undergo in public, private and ecological environments in the context of a climate-induced disaster. Innocent infrastructures, seemingly invisible, re-emerge and gain attention when they fail to deliver what they were supposed to or promised to do (Niewöhner 2015). I highlight how every infrastructure is designed with a specific purpose, but also has unintentional (Eriksen, 2022:205) and sometimes dangerous side effects. To understand what evolves from the relationship between water/sediment (out of place) and grey/green infrastructures in a disaster setting, I approach the flood as a complex set of intra-actions between human and non-human phenomena (Abbott 2016; Tuana 2008; Barad 2003). This holistic approach shows how disasters are not “extraordinary and unexpected bolts from the blue” (Ullberg, 2013:7) but the result of specific social, economic, political and material circumstances before, during and after the event (Faas 2016). By interrogating the safety of such infrastructures, I question the limits of anthropogenic control over our surroundings and propose alternative pathways for facing future challenges of adapting to climate change.
