Exhibitions 2025

Sinking Cities: Jakarta - Venice - Gouda: Three cities facing water issues on the frontline of climate change

The Sinking Cities project addresses one of the most underestimated threats we face: land subsidence. This makes cities vulnerable to flooding, damages buildings and infrastructure and negatively impacts nature and biodiversity. Twenty percent of the world's cities are sinking, affecting a fifth of the global population.

Photographer Cynthia Boll and journalist Stephanie Bakker explore what it means to live in sinking cities in different parts of the world. What are the consequences for residents? How do they adapt? Is there an alternative, a perspective that offers hope? What can other cities learn from them?

This exhibition presents three cities impacted by water: Jakarta, Venice and Gouda. Water brought them trade and growth, determined their physical form and shaped the identities of their inhabitants. But now water – which for centuries brought pride, growth and prosperity – is a threat to these cities’ very survival. Jakarta is the most rapidly sinking city in the world, Venice is the Atlantis of Europe, and Gouda is symbolic of the Netherlands – one of the countries most impacted by land subsidence.

How can we adapt to a changing climate? Considering the tangible and intangible heritage shaped by the very same water that now threatens our cities? The answers from these cities on the frontline of climate change are all different; no one solution is right or wrong. They hold up a mirror to one another, and to other cities facing the same challenges: what are the choices? And what does it mean for cities and their inhabitants? www.sinking-cities.com

Sinking Cities, Jakarta

Jakarta is sinking fast: 7 – 20 centimeters per year due to land subsidence. In most areas, the supply of clean water is either unreliable or unavailable: 60 percent of Jakartans rely on wells which extract water from shallow aquifers. The result: the land above collapses. The problem is being exacerbated by an explosion of new apartment blocks, shopping malls and government offices, which – despite official restrictions on groundwater extraction – not only draw water from the porous ground, but also add to the weight compacting it. As the subsidence continues, flooding becomes more frequent and severe, caused by rivers swollen with monsoon rain bursting their banks as gravity no longer helps them flow to the sea.

To solve the problems, the city needs to supply clean water and end its dependency on groundwater extraction. Tokyo did exactly this in the 1960s, after sinking by more than four metres. Subsidence was permanently halted within a decade. For this to work, Indonesia needs alternative water sources, and this is a major problem. Rivers, reservoirs and lakes are heavily polluted. Experts say it could take up to ten years to clean them up so that water can be piped in to replace extraction from the aquifers deep underground.

Meanwhile, Indonesia's ambitious plan to build a new capital city, Nusantara, is facing significant challenges and slow progress.

Sinking Cities, Venice

Venice, one of Europe’s most iconic cities, was built on water and has survived on water. Now, it is threatened by water. Subsidence and rising sea levels mean the city has sunk by 23 centimetres in the past century. And as the city sinks, flooding is becoming more frequent and more severe. Venice’s answer to this flooding is MOSE, a mobile system of dams that rise up from the sea bed when the tide exceeds a height of 110 centimetres. Although this futuristic dam offers protection against serious floods, it can’t prevent water getting into the city; low-lying districts flood at a high tide of just 60 centimetres. And as sea levels are set to rise – anywhere from 17cm to 120cm by 2100 – the city continues to sink, transforming the ground floors of its buildings into mouldy cellars.

In 2023, Unesco sounded the alarm for a second time: this major World Heritage Site is under threat from construction projects, climate change and mass tourism. Local activists are demanding their city back, saying that it only makes sense to save Venice if the city remains habitable. Who would want to visit or invest in a city that’s lost its inhabitants – and therefore its soul?
There is no long-term vision to save Venice’s natural, cultural and artistic heritage – but there is a man who can buy the city some time. A scientist who had the brilliant idea to raise Venice up again using the same mechanism that is causing it to sink: by injecting water into the layers below the city.

Venice is at the forefront of the struggle against climate change, and the world is watching with interest. Will Venice become the new European Atlantis? Or a kind of laboratory for the world, where solutions to the huge problems of our age are thought up and tried out?

Sinking Cities, Gouda

Subsidence is responsible for twenty-five percent of the Netherlands currently being below sea level. In some areas, the ground has sunk five to ten meters in recent centuries. A total of nine million inhabitants of the Netherlands live and work in an area that is subsiding. Nowhere are the consequences of this as visible and striking as in Gouda, the city known for its cheese and historic city centre.

Built on a subsoil of peat and clay, for centuries urban rubble has been used to raise Gouda – a layer some six metres deep lies beneath the city centre. Unfortunately, the extra weight of this layer of rubble is causing the city to subside even more. Most of the monumental buildings and houses in the city centre are sinking into the ground, causing nuisance and damage to these structures. Without intervention, parts of the city centre will eventually become uninhabitable. After ignoring the issue for decades, the municipality recently launched a rescue plan to lower the water level in the city centre, in effect creating a polder in the city – an experiment never before undertaken.

The story continues in one of Gouda’s working-class neighbourhoods, where residents are coming up with all kinds of do-it-yourself solutions to deal with the subsidence, and then moves on to a family who farm in one of the wettest places in the Netherlands. They are ‘kings of adaptation’: doing what needs to be done in the future. Instead of adapting the land to suit their needs, they are adapting their lives and businesses to the possibilities and constraints of the land.

‘For one of the lowest-lying countries in the world, subsidence is the worst-case scenario’
Gilles Erkens, geologist with Deltares