The time between: Speculative disrepair and flood risk planning in Honolulu

Abstract

The environmental discourse on anticipation has tended toward things to come, not things to come apart. This article examines how disrepair unsettles the ways in which conventional narratives of climate change hinge on the anticipation of environmental crisis. Based on ethnographic research conducted in Honolulu, Hawai‘i, around the planning processes of an urban flood risk management project, I show how and why speculative disrepair—in other words, the worry that anything built will too quickly crumble—emerged as a critical challenge to an infrastructure project attempting to animate the risks of future catastrophic flooding. First, I give shape to anticipation as it relates to the possibilities of environmental change and to speculative disrepair as it surfaced in flood risk planning. Second, I consider how time is exercised in speculative disrepair, and suggest the need for greater attention to temporal intermediacy through the intervening period of the meanwhile. Finally, I detail how delay and disrepair converged in flood risk planning to inform the infrastructural claims made by residents. Considering disrepair, then, as something not only environmentally experienced but also imagined, may suggest a different form of political obligation and relation that will be further demanded in a time marked by anticipatory rule.