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.
The Sea Wall in the shape of a Bird
While Jakarta has serious evacuation plans, there are apparently also plans to build a new and unique sea wall. Quote from an article from 2016:...
Very Large Floating Structures
To answer the never-tiring desire for more space for residential buildings along the coasts - nearly 50% of the industrialized world now lives...
Mazu: Taoist Goddess of the Sea
The bronze statue in the center depicts Mazu or Matsu, the chinese sea goddess, who is particularly popular in Taiwan and Chinese communities...
Manimekhala: The Goddess of the Sea
Manimekhala is a budddhist goddess regarded in Southeast Asia as guardian of the Seas.
climate change and human anger
Pak Permadi, an Indonesian expert for paranormalevents from Java made the following statement at a seminar at Jogjakarta University in 1995: »If...
Nyai Roro Kidul: The Queen of the Southern Seas
The legends around the mermaid goddess Kidul - also Ratu Kidul - are mostly linked to the 16th century Javanese Mataram Sultanate. However,...
Picturing disaster in the 18. Century
In 1783 an unsual seismic event sequence occured along the Strait of Messina between the island Sicily and mainland Italy. Katrin Kleemann...
Looming and Silent Cities
There is an optical phenomenon called looming in which objects at sea appear to be floating in the air above water level. In Spring 2021 such an...
The shepherd and Vineta
This is a popular German legend about Vineta and how the city reappears every hundred years for a day. I have not found an author to this version of...
Ludwig Bechstein: The Tale of Vineta
This is the version from Ludwig Bechsteins collection of German Legends from 1853: Bei der Insel Usedom ist eine Stelle im Meere, eine halbe Meile...
Vineta: the first mention
Vineta is a mythical sunken city off the German or Polish North Sea Coast. I was suprised to find out that the first mention of Vineta can be found...
world in a water tank
German born and UK based visual artist Mariele Neudecker creates aquarium installations of forests, houses or vessels since the late 1990's. Her so...
The afterlife of cities
When cities are deserted, their existences can be traced back by the types of earths in the ground for centuries. Geologists call the type of earth...
yonaoshi – the cleansing disaster
In japanese culture, disasters are commonly interpreted as a call and chance for renewal. The then governor of Tokyo Shintaro Ishihara published a...
Giant Catfish
Japanese culture has a long history of natural disasters, mostly earth quakes. Also the so called Triple-Disaster of 2011 was caused by an...
Atlas of Mediterranean Liquidity
A project of speculative mapping and audio art about sea level rise in the Mediterranean: Link
Divide the Seas!
To counter the global sea level rise, several initiatives have formed to block seas off from the global water flow. The idea behind it: If you...
Physico-Theology: Disaster becomes beautiful
In her essay on the motive of Mount Vesuvius, Valerie Hammelbacher traces the beginning of the image of disaster in art history back to the Britsh...
“Why did he burn the churches down?”
Divine punishment is an ever recuring theme in urban disasters. However, sometimes the situation does not quite fit the morals. In 1906 an earth...
Der Bergsturz by David A. Schmid (1806)
Painting of the Goldauer Bergsturz by at the time sixteen year old Swiss artist David Alois Schmid (1791 - 1861). It depicts the massive landslide...
Calcadas Portuguesa
All along the Portuguese coast city squares are adorned with these types of pavements that resemble ocean waves. The Calcadas Portuguesa depict...