Urbanism and Sustainability: Life with Water

The scale of the current and unfolding climate change crisis makes it everyone’s — and every discipline’s — problem. For tens of thousands of years, many societies have used sustainable structures and strategies to live, adapt, and thrive with a changing and variable climate. These successes required long-term, creative decision-making and creative problem-solving regarding the management of ecosystems and resources. However, the challenge today is unique, with the unprecedented scale and speed of contemporary anthropogenic climate change. At the heart of the climate change and sustainability crisis is a long-term and profoundly complex interplay between cities and water. Cities both contribute to and are negatively impacted by climate change. The expansion of cities is a key driver of climate change — but at the same time, most people affected by water extremes live either in growing urban areas or on rapidly expanding agricultural land that feeds cities. In order to adapt to extreme floods and survive drought we need creative, expansive, and equitable solutions for how to live well with and beyond the climate crisis. An inclusive approach to urbanism allows us to identify amphibious urbanism. Amphibious urbanism, at the creative confluence where land and water mingle, has been present from earliest urban times and continues in many different forms today. Long-term and inclusive approaches to doing ‘Archaeology with the World’ allow us to unlock the range of different forms these fluid cities can take, and helps us better understand how people live together in amphibious spaces with changing water levels. Doing so expands our understanding of how people have lived in challenging environments. In this article we bring together recently published archaeological material from around the world. As an initial reference point, we begin with the tropical wetland cities of South-East Asia, turning to the Americas, and then explore amphibious urbanism more globally with reference to its origins in humanity’s earliest cities, to modern cases. We also provide a broader catalogue of examples of creative problem-solving with water extremes in urban and non-urban contexts which opens up avenues for the next stage of research. We provide a map with examples of archaeological insights and traditional knowledge practices identified as cases for future research. We explain that UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a powerful and broad tool for communicating findings with nonarchaeologists. We conclude with a discussion of the need to understand both urbanism and sustainability in more expansive and inclusive ways. One of the insights this approach provides is that sustainability is not a static state to be unlocked, it is an adaptive ongoing process of transformation.