ABSTRACT
Even if the world gets serious about climate action soon, the next few centuries will likely involve steadily increasing rates of sea level rise. Coastal cities across the world are increasingly going to have to learn to live with the routine presence of water, adapting to tidal incursions, more intense storms and rainfall, increasing salinization of freshwater resources, and more frequent floods. Unlike the more comfortably terrestrial cities of the Holocene period, the amphibious coastal cities of the Anthropocene will have a blurrier boundary between water and dry land. But what if we tried to reconsider that blurriness not as a bug but as a feature? Amphibians do not need wetness to survive, they thrive in wetness. What if we could similarly consider wetness not as a condition of urban life to be battled but as a condition that could and should be embraced? What new modes of urban life could emerge from that attitude adjustment? In this chapter, I discuss Houston, Texas, as an example of an emergent amphibious city to discuss how coastal cities can learn to live with water in new ways.
