Governing sinking worlds: sensemakings of subsidence in Rotterdam, The Netherlands

The neighborhood of Bloemhof in Rotterdam-South is often presented to be sinking because of soil subsidence. The City of Rotterdam makes use of participatory methods to involve a wide range of stakeholders in Bloemhof and to build consensus on how to deal with the subsiding neighborhood. However, what remains unknown is how civil society, civil servants, and subsidence policy programs actually make sense of subsidence. Therefore, we address the question: How do residents, civil servants, and policy programs make sense of subsidence in Bloemhof, Rotterdam-South? We followed an ethnographic approach, focusing on conversational interviews, events, and policy documents, to uncover the often taken-for-granted ways, unexamined assumptions, and consequences of how subsidence is performed differently across actors and domains. We present four main themes characterizing subsidence sensemaking of residents, civil servants, and policy programs in Bloemhof, showing how (1) most only notice discursive cues of subsidence, while relying on remote sensing tools to make subsidence materially visible (cues of subsidence); (2) how the municipal subsidence efforts in Bloemhof are publicly communicated as open-ended, while internally enacted as resistant to political debate (uncertainty and open-endedness); (3) how subsidence is made sense of as temporally distant, yet enacted as requiring immediate responses (subsidence temporalities); and (4) how municipal subsidence efforts are tinkered with to address other matters of concern (institutional tinkering). With this analysis we contribute to sensemaking theory, and hope to attune practitioners’ sensibilities to reflexivity, by showing how particular science-based sensemaking enacts specific realities of subsidence that constrain the enactive capacity of other meanings (i.e., of residents). Broadening the policy space for multiple meanings may help us better connect with diverse (i.e., social, economic, public) domains, human/non-human actors, and material concerns when governing environmental change, in Bloemhof and beyond.