Blog
ResourceS for Adaptation to rising sea levels and sinking cities.
This is a blog containing images, stories, songs, rituals and traditions related to flooding and flood protection from the cultural heritage of coasts worldwide. It is continuously expanded and meant as a free repository to be used by anyone working to increase resilience and well-being for front line communitiies.
Please browse through the posts or search for themes, places or centuries using the Categories. Any email comments, hints or repostings are very much appreciated by the author.
Nürnberg flooded, 1909
The Bavarian city of Nürnberg (Nuremberg) has been flooded quite often over it's history. The flood of 1909 is particularly memorable and the most...
Drawing Extreme Conditions – Emma Stibbon
In an exhibition at the Royal Academy in London in 2023, contemporary British artist Emma Stibbon exhibited her own wood carving "Collapsed Whaling...
“The Eddystone Lighthouse, during a Storm”
The image shows the painting by painter William Daniell of the Eddystone Lighthouse off Rame Head in Cornwall, England during the ‘Great Storm’ of...
Flooding of the Nile as depicted in 1848
"Statues of Memnon at Thebes, during The Inundation", a lithography from 1848 by Scottish artist David Roberts. It appeared in Roberts book on the...
Bionic housing solutions in comics: Aquarica
In a comic book by French authors Benoit Sokal and Francois Schuiten from 2022, an ancient maritime myth is picked up in a comic format. The story...
Put your money on Atlantis
In times like these, what the world needs is good humor and good counseling. And this company apparently offers both. Because if you name your...
Man appears in the Holocene
In my search for books that could be considered "climate literature" or "climate change narratives" I recently came across a volume by Swiss writer...
Floating School of Makoko, Lagos
Nigerian architect Kunlé Adeyemi designed this floating building seen in the lower left corner of this photo. "Half-building, half-boat, the...
Dive to “Dryland”
In the post-apocalyptic action movie "Waterworld" from 1995, all human settlements have drowned as global warming has melted the ice caps. At the...
Atoll Settlement from Waterworld (1995)
Image of the swimming settlement in the movie "Waterworld" from 1995. The settlement is called "Atoll" in the movie but in fact it is a human made...
Doggerland
"When you could walk from London to Paris to get a Croissant for breakfast..." (Jeff Goodell) Land bridge between the mainland and Britain -...
Jakarta’s only floating village
This romantic image is actually a disaster area: Kampung Apung Teko, one of Jakarta's many villages, has become more and more flooded until it...
The Great Pacific Plastic Patch
When I read about this assembly of plastic garbage, I was inevitably reminded of stories out of the saga "Erik the Red" or the Irish Legend of...
Serempak of the Bajau People
This is the traditional festive head gear worn by Bajau women. The Bajau, a formerly nomadic people now mostly home to Malaysia, Indonesia and the...
Sea Peoples
The Orang Laut, who mainly settle in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia, the Moken in Thailand, and the Sama-Bajau who mainly live in East-Malaysia...
Rear View
An image from the movie "The Wave" from 2015. In "Being Ecological" Tim Morton wonders about the prevalent mode of climate writing, which he calls...
The Loen Rock Slides in Norway in 1905 and 1936
Just 31 years lie between two disasters of the same nature along the shores of a lake in Western Norway destroying twice the two lakeside villages....
“Let Venice sink.”
In a 1971 special edition of Architectural Review devoted to the lagoon city author Jan Morris proposes to simply let the city sink. It's a...
The Year without a Summer
The 19. Century was not only the century of industrialization, the spark that "set human civilization aflame" (Andri Snaer Magnason). Between 1800...
Lo Sposalizio del Mare – the Marriage to the Sea
Every year at Ascension Day (Ascensione di Cristo, or "Festa della Sensa" as the Venetians say, it is celebrated in May) the Republic of Venice...
Designing cities below sea level: Paraty, Brazil
Paraty is a small town and tourist location on Brazil's Costa Verde, between Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Rising as high as 1,300 meters behind the...