Civic Resilience Laboratory

Presentation: Messy Knowledge, Ordered Infrastructure: Community Climate Adaptation on Semarang’s Coast

Indonesia’s coastal communities face compounded risks from sea level rise, ground subsidence, coastal abrasion, and intensifying floods. Yet, the embodied environmental knowledge of those most affected remains excluded from the data infrastructures shaping climate interventions. This paper examines the epistemological gap between community-held and institutionalized climate knowledge through fieldwork with two fishing and shellfish-farming communities in Semarang, Tambaklorok and Tambakmulio. Drawing on participatory GIS workshops conducted in July 2026, the research documents how residents perceive environmental change, which ecological cues guide everyday decisions, and how community-held knowledge sustains livelihood resilience. It traces how this embedded knowledge produces interstitial adaptations from raised homes and streets to community-cultivated mangrove belts that operate alongside, and sometimes against, state-led infrastructural fixes such as canal diversions and seawalls. Situating these findings against policy analysis and interviews with planners and officials, the paper argues that state-led adaptation in Semarang remains shaped by engineering standards introduced through international funding and Dutch technical expertise, leaving community knowledge to the interstices of a formally post-colonial infrastructure. It closes by asking what participatory mapping makes visible about whose expertise counts in climate governance.

Keywords: Participatory mapping, Climate adaptation, Coastal urbanism, Environmental knowledge, epistemic justice

Bio: Chaewon Ahn is an urban researcher who visualizes urban data and develops participatory data collection methods to better understand cities and empower their citizens. Her research focuses on the generation and use of urban knowledge at the nexus of community, urban development politics, smart cities, and urban models. She questions how urban data become a system of power when omission from official databases leads to displacement and erasure. Her work builds on a background in architecture, urban planning, and urban information systems, combining ethnographic research on data systems with hands-on experiments in sensors and data visualization.