Japan’s Extreme Infrastructure: Fortress-ification, Resilience, and Extreme Nature

Abstract

How have massive concrete walls become thinkable as resilient infrastructure for an extreme nature, and what will collective life become in the shadow of such concrete resilience? These questions hold increasing importance as cities and nations throughout the world contemplate the construction of giant concrete barriers to resist the forces of extreme weather and rising sea levels. This article turns to Japan’s ‘fortress-ification’ of its northeast coast with giant concrete seawalls in wake of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake in order to explore the convergence of resilience thinking, concrete walls, and extreme nature. Treating fortress-ification as an empirical phenomenon and analytic, the argument tracks the emergence of fortress-ification as a manifestation of a kind of resilience thinking that derives from a synthesis of logics of disaster prevention and disaster reduction. Ultimately, the argument posits that the resilience thinking behind fortress-ification engenders adaptation to extreme nature without providing meaningful environmental mitigation. The result is disaster infrastructure with highly questionable efficacy that seals the population within an ecologically empty present while restricting access to better alternative ecological futures.