Splintering disaster: relocating harm and remaking nature after the 2011 floods in Bangkok

In the wake of the costly 2011 floods, the city of Bangkok struggled to respond to the water inundating Thailand’s major hub. In response, Thai leaders primarily blamed the external forces of nature and climate change. Depoliticising disasters and absolving national leaders of responsibility, these discourses about nature and climate change as the main cause of flooding led policymakers to primarily build infrastructure to block and drain water. We argue that the location and patterns of flood protection infrastructure reflect flows of power and the circulation of capital. We build upon Graham and Marvin’s notion of ‘splintering urbanism’ to develop the concept of ‘splintering disaster’. We do so to make sense of the spatially dispersed, but ideologically unified strategy of flood protection adopted in Bangkok. We argue that the splintered nature of flood infrastructures demonstrates the varied and complex factors that produce new regimes of urban water control in the wake of disasters. As we demonstrate, flood mitigation projects do not foreclose future floodwater, but instead, redistribute nature, risk and injury. The city both shapes and is shaped by this spatially fragmented response to water. We aim to use this concept to develop a conceptual vocabulary for understanding post-disaster infrastructural politics.