Infrastructural hybrids: Examining human/other-than-human entanglements in a climate changed world

SPEAKER: Karen Paiva Henrique, University of Amsterdam

DISCUSSANT: Daniele Tubino de Souza, Wageningen University & Research

DATE: 16 May 2025

ACTIVITY: CEDLA LECTURE

Efforts to adapt cities to flooding have long relied on evolving infrastructural paradigms that seek to overcome past (material) limitations to control exacerbating water flows. In the context of a global climate crisis, the urgency to prevent and manage urban floods has renewed calls for locating the ‘right’ technical solution as defined within global expertise networks. This lecture critically traces how this pursuit for the flood adaptation ideal unfolds in Latin American cities. Focusing on São Paulo’s eastern periphery, I map the evolution of flood adaptation to demonstrate how, when juxtaposed to the complex materialities and temporalities of the city’s floodplains, discrete interventions evolve into new infrastructural hybrids. Attention to such hybrids, I argue, allows for a more nuanced understanding of flood infrastructures as dynamic objects, making visible the many ways in which they entwine, coexist, and transform one another while creating and foreclosing possibilities to achieve urban climate justice.