rain doesn't cause flooding
how landscape colonization suppresses the floodplain: the case of petropolis
In 2022, severe flooding and landslides came to Petropolis, home of the first Portuguese royal family in Brasil (and birthplace of my favorite beer, Bohemia). The glaring colonial history of the place should have foreshadowed these disasters, which were far from "natural." The landscape is shaped by its colonial legacy. As is echoed throughout the post-colonial world, the canals and underground conduits that european colonizers constructed to control rivers and streams are ill-adapted to climate realities, and indeed perpetuate the climate change that pushes these infrastructures well beyond their limits. But the infrastructures don't suffer; people do. The landslides that accompanied the heavy rains were detrimental to systematically neglected communities on the hillsides surrounding downtown, but these rains only hit the news because their floods were impacting the wealthy neighborhoods downstream.
Mapping reveals how topography and chanelization interplay to push water out from underground and into the streets. It's a simple case of a system overflowing. And it overflows because it's designed to overflow, even though it's not designed to overflow. See, petropolis' downtown sits on a riverbed. The river itself was designed by billions of years of geologic and hydrologic forces to overflow during heaver periods of precipitation and upstream inflow. The colonial landscape system wasn't designed to accomodate that. But when the heavy precip comes, the overflow happens, regardless of whether it spills into a spongy floodplain or explodes forth from a post-colonial cement-scape. Water remembers.
This was a classic case of the media blaming weather rather than infrastructure. These narratives uphold a harmful status quo. When we perpetuate the idea that these issues are "nature," we remove responsibility from policymakers, designers, people in power. When we decolonize our ways of thinking about landscapes, we invite a decolonization of landscape itself. This is important for public health because landscapes shape everything -- our access to food, water, education, livelihoods, and social wellbeing.
