Let the sea in - coastal protection and urban development

Smart cities are not so smart after all

Ulrik Ekman's research covers a wide range of disciplines. He is drawn to complex adaptive systems, transitional relationships and network thinking. With a background in computer science, he brings a natural science understanding of systemic thinking to his humanistic research on environmental mentality, resilient urban development and the transformation of our everyday culture. 

Ulrik Ekman has studied urban development globally. In his early research, he traveled to South Korea as part of a UCPH task force to investigate smart cities with a focus on waste management and infrastructure. Smart cities are typically seen as an improvement of urban infrastructure because they are implemented with the intention to increase efficiency, sustainability and quality of life for citizens. However, it became clear to Ulrik Ekman that smart technologies do not make waste solutions more sustainable, just less visible: 

- Smart cities are locked into the paradigm of a modern over-consuming metropolis and a completely traditional way of treating waste. Even if it is via a new smart infrastructure, the treatment is still basically landfills, unclean incineration and very inadequate treatment of wastewater that is discharged into the sea, he says.

Ulrik Ekman realized that he had to change his late modern technological-scientific and cultural-scientific approach and start approaching his research field from a completely different perspective, namely by initiating a difficult dialogue between a strengthned biocentric approach and a weakened anthropocentric one:

- I don't think we can talk about a separation of city and nature, a separation of city and sea. I want to explore the interface between them as an interdependence, a relational interaction as in a dynamic membrane of urban infrastructure and urban niches and their surrounding environments.

A major problem with the way we design and develop coastal cities today is, according to Ulrik Ekman, a typically very anthropocentric and terrestrial or land-based approach:

- We put man and our landed property at the centre while the environment as 'nature' is supposedly to be fought and tamed. The plan for the new artificial island Lynetteholmen in Copenhagen is a good example of a modern and anthropocentric approach to urban development, where the marine environment is seen as a climate adversary.

- As an urban society, we expand the land as an artificial 'third nature' and build technical infrastructure without attributing any significant value to the marine environment. We are colonizing the sea and other life forms around the coasts, so to speak, to have them fit into our current way of life and behaviour, he says. 

The ecotone coastal city

Ulrik Ekman challenges the anthropocentric perspective and believes that we should think in terms of solutions that reduce the human footprint and open up for more bio-centric and nature-based directions that have greater resilience potentials for the city:

- What we used to call 'nature' is neither a passive stable object nor a neutral standing resource separate from us. Rather, our environmental niche should be included in planning as part of a dynamic, relational network that is at least equal to human and urban culture, he says.

He calls this 'belonging with' and describes it as a complex kind of belonging. By this he means a mutual relationship of belonging and interdependence between people, cities and their surroundings.

- In a low-lying country like Denmark, you can't just keep assuming that we have to build defences against the sea and continue systemic or infrastructural colonization with both fast and slow violence ensuing when we have 8,752 km of coast. Then we will be quite busy. It is completely unsustainable in terms of resources, and it is a rather blind repetition of the type of approach that has helped create the current and future climate change.

I miss slower and more humble treatment of the uncertainty and hyper-complexity that really characterizes climate change - because too often we end up with a 'do nothing' or a quick technical 'fix the problem' approach that is counterproductive even in the short term.

Ulrik Ekman encourages us to examine the complex contexts in which life exists and to work with a city's adaptability. This he calls a city that seeks to exist more ecotonically:

- An ecotone is a transition area between at least two biological communities. It is about two or more biotopes exchanging and coexisting or overlapping in an environment. A planning example could be designing to live adaptively with water. In many places you can incorporate flooding into urban planning so that different areas are alternately partially flooded, partially dry, as in Rotterdam or the more recent Chinese sponge cities. Thinking of coastal cities as ecotones can open up new nature-based approaches to coastline and resilience, including plans that seriously reconsider the possibility of relying on phenomena we often culturally dislike, such as migration and planned retreat, he explains.

How do we imagine new sustainable scenarios?

Humanities research has an important role to play in understanding climate change. We need to activate our imagination to come up with new solutions for the design of our coastal cities.

- We can benefit from being a little more humble, uncertain and slow to explore. We can open ourselves up to the interfaces between the infrastructures of the city and its surroundings and how these two complex entities interact, and we need to expand the debate on how non-resilient anthropocentrism can be problematized to bring about real attitudinal and behavioral changes in us as urban people, Ulrik Ekman says.

He believes that there is a strong need to rethink our culture with a new set of values, with new imaginary spaces of possibility for the cities of the future, and not least with everyday practice-oriented and site-specific sensory experiments. Humanistic environmental research could, to a greater extent than is the case, contribute by engaging in deep historicization and complex relational spatialization in interaction with the environment and thereby contribute to changing the traditional way we experience what we call 'our' time and 'our' places and homes. According to Ulrik Ekman, it concerns how we better integrate with our life-giving and 'naturally' rich environments.

Shout-out for environmental research in the humanities

Ulrik Ekman has a shout-out for the precautionary principle for humanistic environmental research. He believes that we are too quick to draw conclusions and act on complex issues:

- I miss slower and more humble treatment of the uncertainty and hyper-complexity that really characterizes climate change - because too often we end up with a 'do nothing' or a quick technical 'fix the problem' approach that is counterproductive even in the short term, he says.

According to Ulrik Ekman there are also significant delays between the good recognition of the problems and the implementation of the more resilient solutions, especially in his specialized field.

- Citizens, urban planners, designers and engineers often have the resources, knowledge and skills to do things differently and better on a research, methodological and practical everyday level. However, the problems of lock-in and repetition arise when this knowledge needs to be translated into political and legislative action. The transition to and through political negotiation and governance is incredibly challenging, even when the resources and knowledge are available, he says.

Ulrik Ekman clearly feels the need to add a humanistic and experiential dimension to climate change research so that it better communicates to citizens, politicians and decision-makers. However, he believes that there is no clear solution to this problem yet, but that it is important to think about how humanistic environmental research can influence policy and help create real change by communicating new environmental aesthetic ways of living sensually with a water poetics. 

A blue transition

We have 8,752 km of coastline in Denmark and obviously live in close interaction with the sea, no matter how life-threatening this marine environment is in our region today. Yet, according to Ulrik Ekman, we are very much behind in Denmark when it comes to thinking about coastal urban development.

- The blue transition, which must address sea level rise, viable marine ecosystems and other maritime issues, should be much more prominent in discussions about climate change and sustainability in Denmark. In comparison, the Netherlands and several East Asian cities are much further ahead in developing dynamic ways of designing coastal cities. It is remarkable that we do not have a vibrant public debate about, for example, retreating many coastal cities to higher ground, developing a network of provincial-sized resilient cities with larger nature corridors and with much more use of a city centre that builds more in depth, underground, and at height than today. They are otherwise recognized as the more sustainable types of design.

You can read more about Ulrik Ekman's research here.