Tidescapes Collaborative
The Tidescapes Collaborative is a non-profit initiative that supports littoral communities envision alternatives to flood-induced displacement.
It is a space for reimagining equitable multispecies futures through vision building and local experiments at placemaking.
WHO
For changemakers, researchers, artists, designers, educators, planners and practitioners from majority-world regions that ask - what other worlds are possible? For those committed to the imperative of decolonizing and pluralizing ideas around what "adaptation" means across oceanic and littoral sites.
WHAT
In a rapidly warming and overbuilt world, underscored by profound transformations across oceans, aquifers, deltas, and riverways, Tidescapes offers an inclusive, safe space for exploring situated experiments and grounded innovations. These include emerging low-impact, affordable socio-technological experiments and vernacular practices that are deeply rooted and inspired by heritage and situated knowledge forms.
HOW
By learning across Africa, Asia, and the Americas, combining arts-centred play-based exploration and other collaborative endeavors that recentre diverse stories on multispecies cohabitation and thriving in waterlogged environments.
WHY
To foster immersive storytelling, practical design strategies, and freely accessible learning methodologies that knit transoceanic and littoral community networks centred around intersectional justice and socio-ecological regeneration.
Our Story
The Tidescapes Collaboratory took shape during years of ethnographic research across the Indo-Malay-Philippines archipelago, generously funded by the German Science Association/DFG), and in collaboration with regional partner universities – Ateneo de Manila University, the National University of Singapore, and Universitas Indonesia (2016-2023).
Much of our community-centered work was around realities of loss, and displacement. and dispossession during interventionist anti-flood projects such as “managed retreat” and the building of deltaic infrastructures. We hearing and sharing stories on relocation and forced eviction, we were also deeply aware of the fact that sea/landscapes are never entirely abandoned. Such often bear residues of past lives lived, and continue to be terraformed and revisited because people hold immense kin- and place attachment, marked by ancestral graves, former farmlands, fish ponds, and other forms of built infrastructure.
Meanwhile, the disconnections and immobilities that the pandemic created made it all the more compelling to hold space – and spaces of safety at that – for critical methods and pedagogies that supported people in rehearsing, telling, and owning their own stories (see for example, “A Collaboratory on Indian Ocean Ethnographies“).
And what of promises for everyday speculative design thinking, beyond the pale of external commodified sociotechnical promises? For within these worlds, we also see immense ingenuity and potential strategies – approaches are accessible, affordable, practical, and transculturally attuned to the situated nuances of places and such processes at experimentation.