The fact that access to the resources necessary for a good life is systematically unequal is not just a result but also a precondition for colonial-capitalist globalization. So far, this injustice has not triggered a world revolution. But the climate catastrophe – a rebellion of nature? – is exacerbating the global social imbalance to such an extent that we must push for a renaissance of demands for equality and justice, not least to avoid leaving the field open to right-wing and authoritarian politics, as Lucas Pohl argues in his contribution to the “Kin City” text series.
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Ban Khun Samut Chin is a coastal community about 10 km south of the outskirts of Bangkok. If you come by car from the city, you will find a barrier. The road ends here and you can only continue on foot. The path to the village hall is a narrow wooden walkway surrounded by water. Only the presence of a roof over the water indicates that the water is not always there. Along the sides of a narrow concrete path that runs through the settlement are piles of washed-up garbage, numerous ruins, and other signs of decay. The community once had more than 600 members. Today there are fewer than 100. Most of them are shrimp farmers. They can use the flooded areas for farming, at least as long as the water doesn’t rise so high that the ponds are permanently under water.
The question of whether the city of Bangkok will be submerged as a result of climate change is a recurring theme in the media. Projections of climate-induced sea level rise suggest that it is only a matter of decades before the city is largely or even completely underwater. Recent studies conclude that in just 15 years, more than 90% of Bangkok’s land area could be inundated by seawater during a major flood. With an estimated population of around 11 million, this is an almost unimaginable scenario.
In May 2024, the deputy director-general of Thailand’s Ministry of Climate Change and Environment floated the idea of relocating the country’s political headquarters – similar to Jakarta. However, unlike Jakarta, he suggested moving not the seat of government but the economic sector.
Is Bangkok already sinking?
Climate experts repeatedly counter the gloomy predictions for Bangkok’s future by saying that the predictions of climate impacts on Bangkok are not very realistic. They point out, for example, that most projections for the city are based on conclusions from global climate studies, which makes the predictions highly speculative. They also emphasize that processes such as sea-level rise will only cause water levels to rise by a few centimeters and are therefore insignificant – but this ignores the fact that such a rise, in combination with other climatic influences, could significantly increase the risk of flood disasters.
In this dispute, however, the more intriguing answer may lie in a third possibility that both sides ignore: that Bangkok is already sinking. Not only is the land subsiding at a rate of several centimeters at a rate of several centimeters per year in addition to rising sea levels –due to the soft clay soil on which Bangkok is built, the immense weight of the built environment, and massive groundwater extraction that further contributes to rising water levels. Moreover, in the case of Bangkok, we are dealing with an outsourced or ‘externalized’ disaster, which is already creating increasingly uninhabitable zones on the outskirts and in the suburbs, while the city center has so far been spared the worst. Pylons rising out of the water, schools barely able to accommodate children, and ruined landscapes as the last remnants of those who are no longer there – these are all symptoms of a policy that is willing to accept “the loss of individual limbs as long as the heart remains intact,” a phrase that was used repeatedly in interviews to refer to a certain willingness to make sacrifices, to accept the loss of some peripheral districts for the sake of preserving the city center.
The Western idea of the ‘Anthropocene’ and its associated climate catastrophe is characterized by dramatic spatial images: gigantic forest fires, melting glaciers, the garbage vortex in the Pacific four times the size of Germany, or cities destroyed by hurricanes and floods. But it is the quieter, almost everyday, but no less existential disasters that go hand in hand with the creeping disappearance of coastal communities like Ban Khun Samut Chin that give us a sense of the spatial conditions of the planetary present. These deeply precarious and porous spaces are characterized by decay, waste and disintegration, as well as by the pervasive absence of people, resources, infrastructure, security, investment, stability, future prospects, etc., which permeates their entire social structure. However, this structure can hardly be called social anymore, since it amounts to making (human) coexistence impossible in the long run.
The ‘less-than-human’
For some time now, there has been a growing discussion in the social sciences and humanities about the ‘more-than-human’ – that is, the realm to which these fields have paid little attention because they have been too centered on the human. In the oceanic spaces on the outskirts of Bangkok, we undoubtedly find a number of ‘more-than-human’ connections – think of the environmental and natural influences that shape local life. However, we also find connections that could be described as ‘less-than-human.’ This less-than-human characterizes an area of life under increasingly intolerable and undignified conditions. Such conditions deprive those who live under them of their status as full human beings, paving the way for a dehumanizing or inhumane regime.
We encounter this less-than-human in the weathered remains of flooded coastal communities like Ban Khun Samut Chin, but also in the flooded streets of Pakistan and on the gradually disappearing atoll islands. This is where the destructive excesses of planetary urbanization manifest themselves, as a system that is already fundamentally based on the dehumanization of certain populations and the externalization of disasters. After all, less-than-human conditions have long been part of modern societies, marginalized and thus largely invisible. They create sites of uneven development, where environmental change reinforces rather than challenges existing social and economic hierarchies.
In recent decades, denial of the unevenly distributed consequences of disasters has ‘successfully’ enabled most societies in the Global North to continue their social lives largely unchanged despite climate change. However, this defense mechanism is beginning to reach its limits. As extreme weather events increasingly affect life in Europe and other parts of the Global North, there is a growing sense that disaster is no longer a distant threat but has become part of ‘our’ present. The idea that the climate crisis is primarily happening ‘elsewhere’ is gradually giving way to the realization that no place is safe from it. Floods, droughts and heat waves are forcing rich countries to take a new, realistic look at the global inequalities of climate impacts. The previous system, which externalized disasters and treated certain parts of the world as ‘sacrifice zones’ in order to keep the consequences at bay, is beginning to crumble.
Pure survival
In the face of worsening climate catastrophe, we are inevitably approaching various tipping points – points at which ecological and climatic processes change abruptly or irreversibly, according to Earth system researchers. But it is also time to read these tipping points in socio-political terms – for example, as moments when the less-than-human surpasses the human and thus becomes the real driving force of societies worldwide. The disturbing interplay of shifting climate zones, rising sea levels, and increasing frequency of extreme weather events, combined with the simultaneous rise of right-wing populist politics, forced migration, armed conflict, and the persistence of colonial and capitalist exploitation, reveals the increasing dominance of the less-than-human in the political and economic designs of human coexistence. It testifies to a moment in which the human could literally be ‘inundated’ by the inhuman. In such a world, life is reduced to mere survival.
To counteract this development, it is not enough to retreat to small enclaves where life continues despite climate collapse. One look at the contested spaces on the outskirts of Bangkok is enough to see that this cannot be a sustainable solution – certainly not for everyone. It is necessary to insist on solutions that maintain the possibility of a dignified life for all, even if – or perhaps because – this possibility seems increasingly impossible. In this context, a revival of the demand for a right to the city can be useful. When Bangkok was hit by the ‘flood of the century’ in 2011, residents of some of the city’s peripheries protested against the unequal measures taken to keep the city center dry. The construction of barriers to protect the city center came at the expense of the suburbs, where water could not drain away and life came to a standstill. Residents responded by chanting that they, too, were citizens of Bangkok. They demanded the same rights as the residents of the city center.
In the unfolding polycrisis of the planetary present, such conflicts will intensify, and the struggle for the right to the city will inevitably merge more and more with the struggle for the right to life. Living in such critical times means not only fighting for the right to (living) space, but also striving to preserve and prevent the disappearance of (living) environments – spaces shaped by local experiences, memories, histories, and a deep ‘sense of place’ that are in danger of disintegrating amidst ever-changing environmental conditions. A planetary urban politics can and must no longer insist on the progression and expansion of ‘sacrifice zones,’ but must instead be guided by a fundamental right to (urban) life – a right that goes beyond mere survival and can only emerge from the demand for equality, solidarity and collective responsibility.