Creative Mapping for Climate Adaptation: Two Case Studies from Jakarta´s Coast

Urban resilience in the face of climate change and increasing hydrometeorological risks depends not only on technical solutions, but also on social practices, local knowledge, and governance structures that shape how adaptation is understood and enacted. Although the importance of social and cultural dimensions in climate adaptation is widely recognised, there are still few approaches that explicitly address them. One approach that has gained increasing attention in recent years is the use of playful methods, particularly games. These approaches typically aim to foster civic engagement, community resilience, and adaptation literacy. Their playful nature creates space for participants to articulate concerns, desires, and tensions while granting them agency—an experience that can be both empowering and motivating.

Drawing on two case studies from Kampung Akuarium, a flood-prone coastal neighbourhood in Jakarta, we examine memory mapping with children and speculative gameplay involving residents and local government officials. These methods are discussed as experimental interfaces between lived experiences of environmental stressors and formal planning processes. We analyse their methodological affordances and limitations, particularly with regard to their capacity to open spaces for collective reflection on spatial transformation and to elicit social and cultural values, including emotional attachments, that are often excluded from technocratic planning.

Creative mapping enabled residents to document their own spatial narratives and experiences with recently implemented flood protection structures. It also revealed that the disconnection of local residents from their familiar environments reflects a broader shift in the cultural landscape of kampungs, where access to the sea has increasingly been restricted through redevelopment, protective infrastructure, and displacement. Aiming to (re)claim cartography as a means of situated storytelling and collective agency, the workshops sought to create spaces for articulating and negotiating relationships with the environment and for imagining alternative futures of life along the waterfront—an endeavour that proved only partially successful. While challenging technocratic mapping practices, the workshops also demonstrated that playful forms of mapping alone cannot counter the realities of spatial planning. They can document experiences and provoke reflection, but re-establishing access to space requires broader structural change. Without explicit links between workshop outcomes and institutional responsiveness, such mapping approaches risk remaining symbolic rather than transformative.

We argue for a context-sensitive and strategic deployment of creative mapping methods as part of broader socio-technical adaptation efforts. When embedded in sustained research and planning processes, they can contribute to more resilient urban futures by linking local knowledge and lived experiences with governance in rapidly transforming urban environments.