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.

This research project begins by examining these resilience discourses from the perspectives of urban development and environmental anthropology, taking into account how key stakeholders—such as the government, building sector, media, and vulnerable communities—situate their resilience in the face of the alarming subsidence rate. We highlight how present-day flooding infrastructure to combat the city’s sinking correlates with Dutch technocratic interventions imposed during colonialism in Batavia (Jakarta). We trace the historical legacy of knowledge formation in resilience that is embedded within flood-management infrastructures, ranging from canalization to the fragmentation in Batavia’s water supply system implemented by colonial administrators in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. By analyzing resilience discourses in flood-related approaches to subsidence through archival material, interviews, fieldwork, and Geographic Information System (GIS) mapping, we call into question both sociohistorical and resilience efforts amid an invisible yet complex disaster in the making.