How do you design your way out of a sinking city?
5/4/202627 min
It sounds like a dystopian story - a city sinking lower every year, streets flooded by tidal waters.. But this is the lived reality of many cities across the globe, particularly in Jakarta, where the city is sinking at a rate of 200 mm per year, the fastest in the world. So far there have been plans to relocate the political community to a new city, and walls to keep out the rising sea. But will any of this be enough? How do you design your way out of a sinking city?
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First 90 secondsBambang Susantono· Guest0:00
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Anthony Burke· Host0:05
[background music] It's not something you think will happen in your backyard, until it does. Driven by a number of factors, including climate change, the places where we live and work are increasingly vulnerable. In some cases, the ground itself is giving way. Streets, homes, whole neighborhoods slipping bit by bit until eventually they are under water. Rafa Athala knows just how quickly that can happen.
Rafa Athala· Guest0:39
[background music] After work, I'm just going to the gym. It's a 15-minute walk from my place. Once I get to the gym, it starts raining really heavily. And then I just stay there for around an hour, and then once I go out, it basically just flooded already. Just one hour it can just get massively flooded. Uh, I waited for an hour and a half, kind of realized that the flooding won't disappear anytime soon, so I just basically brave myself and just walk through. It was knee-deep.
Anthony Burke· Host1:08
[chuckles] This is a dark episode. There's no getting around that, but it's also about what comes next. Worldwide, more than six million square kilometers of land is slowly sinking. To put that into perspective, that's roughly the combined size of India, Argentina, and Japan, affecting nearly two billion people. Today