Volatile city life Knowing-and-making coastal subsidence in Semarang

This thesis is an ethnographic study of unstable landscapes. The instability or volatility I explore is the soil subsidence that emerges from the underground movements of clay, sand, and water in the city of Semarang, Indonesia. Taking cues from the hypothesis that coastal subsidence is understood, traced, and experienced differently by different actors, I adopt a following-the-action strategy to study everyday practices of knowing-making subsiding landscapes. The practices I explore in the thesis are the quantification and explanation of land subsidence by earth scientists, work in shrimp- and fishponds, repairs of coastal bodies and homes by female residents, and residents mapping land ownership and elevating houses as future-making practices.
This patchy exploration of coastal subsidence in Semarang draws attention to how the different spatial and temporal rhythms of flows of sediment, water, and capital interfere with each other to create multiple heterogeneous presents and futures that seldom can be easily merged or comfortably fitted together. Doing so supports a shift in the politics of coastal subsidence from one of control hinging on ambitions of predictability and the purification of land from water, towards one that centers on continuous acts of maintenance and reinforcement of more-than-human relations that thrive on in-between spaces and non-determination. Permanence and firmness, or so I tentatively conclude, may not be the most useful guiding principles for understanding and making existence possible on an unstable earth. Perhaps this instead requires embracing, thinking, and learning to live with conditions of impermanence and hesitance.