Angelika Fortuna

Collaborative Fellow 2023

Beyond Disasters: The Discourse of Resilience in a Sinking Jakarta

In the last decade, Northern Jakarta sank a staggering 2.5 meters, earning notoriety as the world’s most rapidly sinking city. Many researchers have projected that 90 percent of the coastal area will have subsided below sea level by 2030 or in another scenario by 2050. Anthropogenic factors such as rapid urbanization—with booming economic activity and expanding built-up areas—exacerbate the issue by accelerating subsidence at an unprecedented rate. Responding to this situation, discourses of resilience have arisen in policymaking and the public sphere. At the same time, the issue of subsidence has been approached as a flooding issue, which oversimplifies efforts to mitigate the sinking crisis.

More information

Areas of interest

International Development Indonesia Southeast Asia Urban Planning Climate Change Resilience Coloniality Postcolonialism

Cohort

CF1

Biography

Angelika Fortuna is a Program Officer at International NGO Forum on Indonesian Development (INFID). She currently works with international development agencies such as the Ford Foundation, USAID, GIZ and others to support developmental projects in Indonesia. She obtained a Bachelor’s Degree in Urban Planning from Tarumanagara University in Jakarta and a Master’s Degree in Socio-spatial Planning from the University of Groningen. She is also part of the SEED group at Informal Urbanism Research Hub (InfUr), University of Melbourne.

She undertakes research and program management by combining Qualitative Methodology and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to foster knowledge in urban resilience, its socio-environmental entanglements and historical processes featuring case studies in Jakarta and beyond. With MPIWG, her current research examines the discourse of resilience within the issue of severe land subsidence in North Jakarta. It traces the historical knowledge formation in infrastructural resilience by analyzing the Dutch flooding approach in Batavia (colonial city of Jakarta) developed in the 18th-19th century. This research then calls to both socio-historical and resilience perspectives against the sinking, whilst questioning the efficacy of Western centric paradigm towards disaster resilience and its manifestation in both colonial and postcolonial context of Jakarta as one of the world’s fastest-sinking coastal cities.

Biographical details correct as of 18.09.24