How can we see and do alternate urban futures in the face of the climate crisis? Exploring the (im)material spaces and histories of Jakarta, New York, and Rotterdam, Form and Flow is a detailed and careful study of contestations over what our urban futures look like in the context of the climate crisis. Unveiling a multiscalar network formation among these cities, Goh unpacks their environmental plans, reflecting on the multiple facets of climate justice that emerge from them and the alternate, ground-up, community-oriented narratives—referred to as “the counterplans” in the book. As Goh describes, counterplans emerge to challenge top-down urban environmental plans that are insufficiently attentive to the needs of socially-spatially marginalized communities. The author contends that “design plays multiple roles in the production and legitimization of urban environmental plans” (158). In short, design is political.
Goh also posits that, while urban design is framed by specific historical and geographical contexts, it is also shaped by globalized (and potentially contested) ideas about environmental planning. Jakarta, New York, and Rotterdam are examples of seemingly distant coastal cities affected and threatened in specific ways by the climate crisis. Yet, in conceptualizing the making and remaking of politics of climate change adaptation, Goh illustrates that they are intertwined by how struggles for alternate visions emerge and evolve. As such, urban design has to be understood as a socio-spatial process that is shaped both by local specificity and by globally shared ideas and practices. Here Form and Flow advances its main conceptual contribution to the political ecology of design in ways that intertwine the global, the national, and the local.
Building on personal and professional accounts, Form and Flow reads like a photo album, whereby Goh captures specific moments of environmental plans and counterplans toward theoretical reflections on the nature of contestation. The reader is immersed in empirical findings, first from New York and Jakarta (chapter 2), then from Rotterdam (chapter 3).
By discussing examples of socio-spatial marginalization in New York and Jakarta, Goh shows how these sites have both similarities and differences in their designs and top-down responses to environmental stress. In both cities, for instance, Goh traces how marginalization is driven by class inequalities and poverty and how this shapes the socio-spatial impacts of extreme weather events, exacerbated by climate change. In discussing the aftereffects of Hurricane Sandy in New York City, for example, Goh points out that “the impacts were often invisible” while being “particularly perilous for low-income citizens” (59). In writing about the 2007 and 2013 floods of Jakarta, Goh traces how these exacerbated the “plight of the urban poor” (32) in ways that mirrored the socio-spatial marginalization in New York.
Yet, the roots and expressions of marginalization in Jakarta differ from the ones in New York. In Indonesia, the Dutch colonial period created the systemic basis for spatial segregation that is still visible today in the informal kampungs of Jakarta. As Goh describes, the historic legacy of Dutch colonialism means a contemporary “relegation of poorer residents to low-lying, risky coastal and river edges” (36). In New York, Red Hook and the Lower East Side reveal marginalization through systemic racism, racialized violence, and a loss of access to public housing and public transportation for Black Americans. In these sites, residents are based in “the worst impacted localities with the least capacity to respond” (65) because of a particularly American form of racial socio-spatial marginalization. Thus, although both New York and Jakarta are characterized by an underserved socioeconomic class that is socio-spatially marginalized, the logic of how this class was constructed in each case differs. In this context, Goh allows us to trace how “marginalization and organizing against marginalization” are rooted in the identity politics of places, from their “collectivity, knowledge, and movement building” (87).
As cities respond to ecological and climate crises, contestation over top-down urban environmental plans originates from alternative socio-spatial visions from marginalized communities. Goh describes the emergence of dominant forms of urban planning, proposing solutions to environmental stresses that are (and remain) technocratic. Form and Flow unpacks how New York, Jakarta, and Rotterdam responded to hurricanes and extreme weather events, floods, storm surge, and sea level rise by adopting top-down initiatives like Rebuild by Design (in New York), the Giant Sea Wall Plan (in Jakarta), and Rotterdam Climate Proof (in Rotterdam).
Notably, these dominant plans were often conceptually and practically connected through global networks. Rebuild by Design involved not only federal and state government planning but also input on urban design from the Netherlands, while the Giant Sea Wall Plan relied in part on Dutch funding and planning, among other resources (including the World Bank). Rotterdam Climate Proof in particular illustrates global connectivity, which is at the heart of Form and Flow. In chapters 3 and 5, Goh shows the reader how urban planning in Rotterdam is connected to global narratives of neoliberalism and urban planning in New York and Jakarta. As she illustrates, Dutch firms linked Rotterdam to both New York and Jakarta through relational geographies of flowing finances, postcolonial ties, and technical advice to both Rebuild by Design and the Giant Sea Wall Plan. The book itself is a network of sites, which the reader navigates with a theoretical compass based on relational geographies and environmental politics. As such, this book is an exploration, ultimately calling for alternative ways of seeing and alternative ways of doing, advancing quests for justice to contest dominant plans.
The (counter)plans of these cities are the subjects of chapter 4. Here Goh tells the readers how local communities develop arguments about urban design in ways that “negotiate between the structure of [the dominant plans] and the sociopolitical contexts of their localities” (158). The author highlights how, in these cases, local grassroots organizing often “led the way in poststorm recovery efforts” (29) alongside top-down planning efforts. In more detail, she traces how organizations like Red Hook Initiative and Community Resiliency in New York and Kampung Design Activism in Jakarta contested dominant plans for climate change adaptation with alternative visions and by building new community coalitions. In discussing Jakarta’s Giant Sea Wall Plan, for instance, Goh points to the way that the plan’s measure of success was based on how well it fit with “the fortunes of large-scale privatized real estate development,” even where it “neglects and exacerbates chronic infrastructural and social problems” (155). As such, initial plan designs focused on the forced removal of kampungs to “normalize” (124) the flow of rivers, which meant the displacement of vast swathes of already marginalized poor communities. In response, Kampung Design Activism emerged as a grassroots effort to oppose forced relocation. It used plans drawn by community architects to help residents orient their living structures in ways that alleviated environmental stress, but without the wholesale removal initially expected owing to the Great Sea Wall. Goh traces similar forms of community organizing in the Red Hook Initiative in New York City, which saw similar reliance on community organizing and collective ownership of urban planning.
Goh contends that design stems from a network of actors, visions, narratives, and counternarratives, illustrated by her proposed and novel framework—“the political ecology of design” (chapter 5). She illustrates that urban landscapes are socio-spatial sites where multiple visions converge, coexist, and speak with each other. It is through the lens of the political ecology of design that “historically determined social relationships” and “possibilities” come together (180). Marginalization and oppression based on socioeconomic inequality and poverty exist in cities. They do so by layering on already-present power structures: neoliberalism, capitalism, colonialism, racism, and postdictatorial structures. Historically dependent, these structures do not stand, in isolation; instead, they are globally intertwined in the coproduction of design that unravels through economic investments, historical and colonial ties, and institutional collaborations. Goh’s argument suggests that “circulating ideas reflect concrete spaces” (112). Being critical in her analysis of how space is produced and flows (chapter 4), the author illustrates that design results from relationships, coalitions, and negotiations across urban ecologies, populated by actors, finances, visions, and struggles. Therefore design is mediated by structural and relational power.
Thoughtfully written, Form and Flow is a multidisciplinary study of urban visions and contestation of dominant environmental plans, which brings into conversation theory and praxis of socio-spatial politics. Goh enriches her empirical insights with photographs and facilitates the understanding of conceptual frameworks with clear illustrations. Capturing compelling nuances in how environmental (counter)plans come to be, the author charges her analysis by asking, whose environmental plans are designed in Jakarta, New York, and Rotterdam?
Overall, the book is rich in its analytical content and discussion. The author supplements the main chapters of Form and Flow with important methodological reflections in the appendixes, allowing us to gain a deeper grasp of how this research flourished and its aftermath. While Goh is critical in her analysis of dominant plans, Form and Flow would have welcomed a more charged account of how these market-based and technocratic plans build on hegemonic ideologies. Similarly, the book refers to marginalization and grassroot initiatives in New York and Jakarta, yet the reader is offered limited insight into how these existed on the ground. In addition, the pages can be, at times, populated with dense details for the readers to navigate. Remarkably, Goh speaks to practitioners, calling for political education to inform environmental planning in “insurgent urban landscapes” (181). In summary, the author is thorough in her writing and critical of the underlying assumptions in the design of environmental plans, rendering Form and Flow a central book to trace the relational geographies of urban ecologies in the context of the climate crisis.