VIRTUAL Barcelona Livable Cities

Abstract

Coastal cities in the United States which possess significant military infrastructure find themselves both economically and operationally squeezed by the effects of climate change and sea level rise. As a key component of the country’s hard power, naval bases project significant influence globally, but remain incredibly vulnerable to threats as mundane as tidal flooding and as extreme as Atlantic hurricanes. Sea level rise has the power to erase actual square footage of United States landmass and has the potential to dramatically reshape global coastal regions by 2100 and even before. In these and other coastal regions, paradigms of internal military governance must respond to a non-static and implacable change in the global environment. Urban political ecology (UPE) is a field of theories which relates to the duality and hybridity between the human and the non-human in urban environments. This vein of knowledge has been underutilized in regards to its application to atypical built environments like military bases or even military ships, which have their own communal, commercial, and residential logics. UPE can fundamentally reframe positions and suppositions of control in the built environment, largely by incorporating green and growing infrastructures into hardscape and otherwise impermeable constructions. Using the tenets of UPE to incorporate the idea of the military installation into the core cluster of notions of the urban, rather than leaving it as an outlier, can create solutions which can mitigate flooding, prevent damage from storms, and keep coastal US military systems running through conceptual binding into urban nature.