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Singapore in the 1950s was a deeply divided society. Struggling to recover from the hardships of the Second World War and fighting an internal battle that the British government termed an 'emergency', it was a time of hardship, tension, and anxiety. In the midst of this crisis, Singapore's inhabitants continued to manage the natural elements of their climate and environment, especially the dangerous combination of heavy monsoonal rains, low-lying marshland, and tidal flooding. This article examines the circumstances surrounding a particularly severe episode of flooding that occurred in December 1954. It explores how the flood's impact was exacerbated by human exigencies, especially recent government resettlement plans and infrastructural weaknesses. In line with the themes of this special issue, it explores the notion of 'justice' during a disaster. In this case, justice was intimately related to political agency, social vulnerability and resilience. Viewed in this way, the flood story can be used as a lens into the wider socio-political contexts of the time.
A history of urban floods underlines the state’s efforts to discipline people as well as to control floodwaters. We focus on two big cities in Southeast Asia—Singapore and Metro Manila—in the period from after World War II until the 1980s. During this period, both cities traversed similar paths of demographic and socio-economic change that had an adverse impact on the incidence of flooding. Official responses to floods in Singapore and Manila, too, shared the common pursuit of two objectives. The first was to tame nature by reducing the risk of flooding through drainage and other technical measures, as implemented by a modern bureaucracy. The second was to discipline human nature by eradicating “bad” attitudes and habits deemed to contribute to flooding, while nurturing behavior considered civic-minded and socially responsible. While Singapore’s technocratic responses were more effective overall than those in Metro Manila, the return of floodwaters to Orchard Road in recent years has highlighted the shortcomings of high modernist responses to environmental hazards. This article argues that in controlling floods—that is, when nature is deemed hazardous—the state needs to accommodate sources of authority and expertise other than its own
International Journal of Water Resources Development, 2005
Water Security in Asia
Journal of Australian Studies, 2018
Although scholarship shows how collective memory aids community resilience to hazards, socio-political forces erode this transformative potential. A study of Brisbane River floods highlights the entanglement of memory with a myth of flood immunity, created by community faith in dams to prevent flooding, infrequent floods, drought and hydrological misunderstandings, and upheld by floodplain development perceived as an economic booster. When flooding threatened the myth of immunity in 2011, the event was framed as dam mismanagement to deflect attention from poor land use practices and government culpability. This myth endures, leaving southeast Queensland no more resilient for unpredictable, but certain future flooding.
Development projects evolve with reference to particular framings of the need and imperatives of a developing country. Once development projects get legitimated in this way, the aid agencies deepen their presence to move in a direction of their choice. This is evident from an examination of the 1954 flood in Nepal which devastated a significant part of the hills and Tarai in the eastern, central and western areas. This paper looks into the disaster caused by that flood; into how the government of Nepal, the civil society and donors responded to it; and into the way the crisis stirred conflict and contestation among political parties within and outside the government. This paper is based primarily on the review of newspaper coverage around the flood, the political processes and the inauguration of development project in Nepal in the 1950s. It shows the extraordinary power of how the crisis caused by flood stirs up political contestation and helps legitimise actions of one or the other actor, including the donors. These insights on the power of a big disaster to command response from a wide range of domestic actors and donors help us question the largely technocratic framing of the ongoing debate around disaster risk reduction.
Planning for the land uses in cities and planning for the hazards that impact on cities have only slowly begun to connect with one another. This paper uses historical floods in Brisbane and a framework of 'ideas, interests and institutions' to explore the range and impacts of flood responses since the 1890s. For much of Brisbane's history there was no coherent land use planning so both the land use planning system and its integration with flood mitigation are relatively new. The first major floods affecting the modern settlement were in 1890 and 1893 but other serious floods followed in 1908, 1931, 1974 and 2011. Numerous more moderate floods also occurred over this period because much of the city is built on a floodplain. The paper explores the proposals that have been put forward and by whom, the outcomes of these proposals and the effect of the growing institutionalisation of urban planning. It identifies the ideas, interests and institutions involved. There are lessons for better informed urban land use planning and for better hazard mitigation.
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