2026 Theses Doctoral

Flooding Forestalled: Environmental Planning, Infrastructure, and Disrepair in Honolulu

Ratté, Stephanie M.

City officials and engineers warn that Honolulu, Hawai‘i faces the possibility of catastrophic flooding in one of its central watersheds and in the canal to which the watershed drains. This artificial waterway, built in the 1920s, bisects the famed tourist enclave of Waikīkī from adjacent valleys, and is the polluted backdrop to its touristic fantasy. Based on ethnographic fieldwork across eighteen months in Honolulu, this dissertation examines how the City and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers engage in what they understand to be an attempt to save this landscape and those who inhabit it from the potentially ruinous effects of climate change-related storms.

Through participant observation, in-depth interviews, and archival research, I look at how this flood project draws upon catastrophe’s temporal and moral authority, and examine the tensions that arise as engineers and planners propose infrastructural changes to the urban landscape under the banner of a coming catastrophe. Drawing from interdisciplinary scholarship around political ecology, infrastructural studies, and settler colonial and Indigenous literatures of Hawai‘i and continental North America, my dissertation offers an account of the work to anticipate flooding, with attention to the landscape across material and temporal scales—from everyday encounters with crumbling concrete to worries around a future sunken coast. I present a contrast to environmental examinations which tend to illuminate the effects and affects of disaster in its aftermath by focusing on the timespace of flood risk planning, which urges action “before” catastrophe in order to prevent potential ruin.

This research intervenes in contemporary debates about the environmental crisis, on the one hand, and infrastructural theories of maintenance and repair, on the other, by considering these two as fundamentally joined. I suggest that the conjunction of these two concerns illuminates distinct temporal modes, practices, and values that take seriously the materiality of Honolulu’s infrastructural landscape in the shadow of climate change.

Specifically, the dissertation (1) traces how the city’s landscape is made durable through the juncture of nature, settler coloniality, and ambivalence; (2) shows how infrastructural breakdown troubles the predominant focus of state-directed anticipation on climate crisis and its avoidance, producing new kinds of anticipatory practices oriented instead around gradual decline; and (3) argues for attention to temporal intermediacy as an analytic that can reveal with more precision the environmental politics of contested settler landscapes. Intermediacy centers the deferrals, delays, and just-enough practices of living in a long meanwhile, and, I suggest, is critical to a more robust understanding of the labor, ethics, and politics of climate change.