Marie Belland is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Human Geography, Urban Planning and International Development Studies at the University of Amsterdam. She joined the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Networks (ITN) NEWAVE “Next Water Governance” program in November 2020. Within NEWAVE, her research focuses on “Integrating patterns of urban water governance in Southeast Asia” (ESR 13).

Prior to beginning her PhD, Marie Belland worked for two years in the field of international scientific cooperation. She also took part in several research projects dedicated to the study of environmental issues in various urban contexts. Investigated topics included the exposure to air pollution in Abidjan, Ivory Coast as a part of the EU-funded DACCIWA, “Dynamics-Aerosol-Chemistry-Cloud Interactions in West Africa”, urban agriculture and urban farmer in France, as well as water conflicts in Central Java, Indonesia. She holds a master’s degree in international cooperation from the Toulouse Institute of Political Studies.

Marie Belland investigates urban politics through the case study of land subsidence in the city of Semarang in Central Java, Indonesia. More precisely, she examines multiple ways to approach land subsidence and actively engages in the pluralization of subsidence knowledge through the exploration of currently understudied practices and knowledge – especially those of the residents most affected by subsidence – using ethnographic methods. Her research is informed by urban political ecology and science and technology studies theories. Through an attention to the everyday, the study traces the spaces and moment of encounters between multiple knowledge and practices of land subsidence. Doing so, the PhD projects aims:

1. To describe everyday practices and knowledge of land subsidence in an effort to better understand land subsidence in its complexity.
2. To explore how identified practices and knowledge take part in the imagined futures of the sinking areas.
3. To reflect on how land subsidence is known for multiple groups and how scholars can research and take into account pluralized knowledge.  
4. To contribute to the debate about the futures in Semarang ‘sinking’ areas – beyond the “technological-fix” of land subsidence.