Master plans as cosmograms: articulating oceanic forms and urban forms after the 2010 tsunami in Chile

Abstract

The 2010 tsunami that severely affected coastal towns of the south-central region of Chile posed a novel cosmopolitical challenge: how to articulate urban environments with future tsunamis, how to cope with the radical asymmetry between human life and overwhelming oceanic forces. This challenge was addressed in various master plans for sustainable reconstruction of coastal settlements relying on two types of expert knowledge and practice that for decades were not considered in city policies, those of geographers expert in oceanographic modelling and architects expert in urban design. The master plans developed not only make apparent the more-than-human assemblages that make up the urban, but put also at stake nothing less than the very definition of what constitutes an urban world. If, as Latour suggests, cosmopolitics is the clash of conflicting cosmograms, master plans are powerful cosmograms, ie. diagrams of urban cosmos proposing which entities and relationships are expected, possible and desirable in the city. In order to understand the way these master plans bring a cosmos along with them, I analyze three distinct cosmogramatic operations: the territorialization of tsunami hazard, the classification of entities and urban activities, and commonalization of urban works. Through these operations, the master plans seek not just to govern populations and human activities, in order to reduce their exposure to mortal danger, but also to govern tsunamis, in order to soften, or even civilize, their behaviour in the city.