Colonial Ghosts of Sinking Cities: Contemporary Climate Change Imaginaries in New York City, Mexico City and Amsterdam

This dissertation explores the role that colonials pasts play in the way in which the future is imagined in cities that are sinking due to climate change. Climate change is often presented as a planetary and universal problem: a future ecological threat looms over the entire world's population. Despite this "future" and "global" frame, this dissertation focuses on local differences and the impact of the past. Three cities from three different geographic areas therefore form the core of this research: New York City (North America), Mexico City (Central America), and Amsterdam (Europe). These cities face similar challenges because they are sinking or subsiding. In all cases, the risk of sinking and potential flooding is exacerbated by climate change. These risks call for adaptations and different ways of dealing with water. In all three cities the past is recollected in order to make the city resilient to ecological problems in the future: waterways that were erased in the past by a modernist conception of the landscape (in which water was always seen as an enemy and was pumped away or buried) are being brought back to light. They are once again given a place in the contemporary city, which is, as it were, opened up. Not only physically, but also mentally. "Nature" is no longer opposed to the "urban," but must, on the contrary, become part of it again. Frameworks of our thinking—frameworks that previously separated human and nature, or water and land—are being redefined. Such a shift in mentality demands a new perspective on the city. And it is precisely this "perspective"—the "new way of seeing"—with which landscape architects, scientists, artists, and writers reimagine and reshape the city that plays a central role in this dissertation. This ocular vocabulary reveals blind spots, things that transcend the existing frameworks of modern thinking about humanity and nature. This dissertation considers these blind spots as "ghosts." A ghost is something that doesn't adhere to existing frameworks and doesn't care about boundaries: a ghost is elusive and easily penetrates barriers. A ghost, too, is something that is dead and buried, but never a complete absence: it has always been able to stir the present and the world of the living from a position of invisibility. Many of the urban imaginaries that promote a new way of seeing, and which are explored in this dissertation, attempt to reconcile with the new reality of climate change. They often claim to have found ways to understand this new reality, to bear witness to it through a particular vision that allows them to bring ghosts to light: things from the past, buried or left out of view by old ways of thinking, that are evoked to make us see the city, our present, and ourselves differently. This dissertation approaches the ghosts attached to urban climate imaginaries at two levels: a metaphorical and a metonymic level. The metaphorical level focuses on the ghosts that are performed by the imaginaries under investigation and their new way of seeing. These ghosts are illuminating and, in that sense, metaphorical: the imaginaries point to something and say, "This element is like a ghost, and our vision brings it to light (we now see more, as it were)." What elements from the past are brought back into view and incorporated into the new urban space, and what does this say about the resulting image of the city? The metonymic level, on the other hand, focuses on the ghosts that unknowingly penetrate the perspective presented in the images under investigation—the blind spots of their own vision: the past that clings to the images, genres, clichés, and rhetoric presented, thus coloring how the new situation is perceived. These ghosts operate obscuringly and are, in that sense, metonymic: the imagaries attempt to clarify the new, but do so through images drawn from a different, older context.