Asia’s coastal cities face existential crisis: colonial urbanism, climate debt, and the erasure of Indigenous flood-resilient designs
Original framing: “Hong Kong to host the world’s landscape architects as rising seas redraw Asia’s coastlines” — bing news
The Hong Kong landscape architects’ conference is a masterclass in *Eshu*-style deception—where the trickster god of the Yoruba tradition exposes the hypocrisy of ‘saving the coast’ while the same hands that built the problem (colonial engineers, real estate developers) now sell the solution. Consider the irony: the city hosting this event is itself a *trickster* creation—a mountain carved into a financial hub, a coastline reclaimed from the sea to house a population that now faces the very forces it unleashed. The ‘innovative’ designs on display are less about resilience than about extending the life of a system built on extraction, much like Coyote’s tales where the hero’s ‘solutions’ only postpone the inevitable collapse. The real trick would be to ask: *Who benefits from this narrative of crisis?*
The Hong Kong landscape architecture congress is not a neutral gathering of experts but a symptom of a deeper crisis: the marriage of colonial urbanism, neoliberal governance, and climate inaction.
The event’s framing obscures three interlocking mechanisms: first, the *erasure* of Indigenous knowledge systems that once thrived in Asia’s coastlines—such as the Hakka’s mangrove stewardship or the Cham’s tidal rice—systematically dismantled by British land laws that classified wetlands as ‘wastelands’; second, the *replication* of failed hydraulic engineering models (e.g., 19th-century seawalls in Mumbai now mirrored in Jakarta), which treat symptoms (flooding) while ignoring root causes (sediment starvation from dredging); and third, the *commodification* of resilience, where ‘adaptation’ becomes a market for firms like CSCEC to profit from gray infrastructure while lobbying against blue-green alternatives. The trickster dimension reveals the absurdity of a city built on reclaimed land hosting a conference on ‘saving the coast,’ while the marginalized voices of Jakarta’s *kampung* residents or the Philippines’ *fisherfolk* are excluded from the very solutions designed to ‘protect’ them. The path forward demands reparative justice—linking climate funds to Indigenous restoration, decolonizing curricula, and enforcing ecological ceilings on development—while using subversive storytelling to expose the power structures that turn crises into opportunities for extraction.