Concrete Causes Floods
NOT LONG AGO, I VISITED SORONG, a city growing in concrete. Sorong’s infrastructure boom makes the consequences of building with concrete clear: concrete causes floods. Water rolls along horizontal concrete (including asphalt) and splashes off vertical concrete. Where both kinds of surfaces abound, surface inundation—that is, flooding—is bound to happen. The fact that no one dares to mention this in cities across the world has everything to do with the ubiquitousness of concrete in the modern imagination.
Of course, Sorong has its own particularities, but these only highlight the general problem by showing it in exaggeration. Sorong was founded for oil in the 1930s under Dutch colonial rule. In the 1960s, U.S. Cold War politics transferred Papua to Indonesia. Since then, and especially since the turn of this century, the city has grown through eradication of indigenous swamplands and building with concrete. Rapid landscape transformation makes the effects of building with concrete particularly vivid. Concrete is used to drain and build on swamps. It brings buildings above the waterline, raised on higher and higher foundations. Concrete troughs replace streams. Concrete walls guard against fresh and salt water. Concrete joins a race in which each builder tries to stay ahead of sinking land and rising waters; some are always left behind.
It’s almost a reflex to blame flooding in coastal cities on global warming. There are more storms, people say, and each is more destructive. This is true. But the way that flooding occurs in coastal cities has everything to do with concrete infrastructures as landforms that move water around, both by design and against it. All concrete directs
