Seeing like a pond: Amphibious stories of coastal subsidence in Central Java

• Narratives of urban sinking overlook the materiality of subsiding areas. • We revisit the history of Semarang as a struggle between amphibiousness and purity. • Ponds show how coastal Semarang emerges and dissolves in multispecies relations. • Purity-oriented projects are destructive for coastal relations and ways of being. • In subsiding areas, industrialization and land speculation reinforce one another. Sinking cities populate imaginaries of the future in ways that resign entire populations of humans and non-humans to erasure. In this article, we take issue with the narrative of sinking as ‘losing ground to the sea’ through ethnographic research in the periphery of Semarang, Indonesia. Drawing on recent scholarship that calls for de-essentializing the water-land divide, we set out to write an amphibious history of the North Coast of Java. We do this by following shrimp- and fishponds, or “tambak” through time. Tambak are ambiguous spaces of encounter for the decisive protagonists of North Java coastal history: sediments, fresh- and tidal-waters, shrimp, pond workers, and developers. We mobilize tambak as an ethnographic device to re-tell three episodes of this history: the shifts of tidal flows shaping coastal landscapes since the 1900s; the enclosure of ponds due to shrimp farming intensification in the 1980s; and more recently, land speculation and the coerced acquisition of submerged and contaminated land. These three episodes, or so we argue, are connected by the struggle between amphibiousness and purification, aimed at separating land from water. The outcome of this struggle is not settled, as projects of purification never fully succeed. Yet, purity-oriented practices and projects to make dry land do cause coastal dispossession and the loss of more-than-human relations in and around the ponds. Driven by concerns for these losses, we propose a shift in the politics of coastal subsidence from the purification of land from water, towards the maintenance and reinforcement of more-than-human amphibious relations.