Sacrifices

What does it take to keep the world in unison?

This question has long guided my exploration of landscapes at their edges – places shaped as much by necessity as by ambition. While navigating one of the world’s largest metropolitan areas, I encountered an extraordinary site of environmental engineering: the Metropolitan Outer Area Underground Discharge Channel in Tokyo. Constructed between 1992 and 2006, this vast subterranean system diverts overflow from six surface rivers, reducing the risk of catastrophic flooding during periods of heavy rainfall. Although similar flood-control infrastructures exist across the globe, few approach this one in scale or spatial intensity.

In planning circles, newspapers and popular culture, such structures are often celebrated as triumphs of human ingenuity and technological mastery. Yet while revisiting this photographic series, a different question began to surface: how long can this logic of ecological engineering persist?

Across the world, cities are increasingly burdened by the cumulative consequences of long-term urbanisation and the attempt to dominate natural systems. Rivers have been channelised, wetlands drained, and natural retention areas replaced by urban development and intensive agriculture. Ecological balances have been pushed beyond their limits. The Tokyo discharge channel is one manifestation of this condition, where excessive groundwater extraction has led to severe land subsidence; the loss of natural floodplains has increased surface vulnerability; and despite continuous expansion of the discharge channel for billions of USD, the system’s capacity remains barely sufficient.

Elsewhere, the situation has become even more acute. In Indonesia and Iran, governments have decided to relocate entire capitals, acknowledging that technology alone can no longer protect cities from sinking into the ground or drying out altogether.

Against this background,, while looking at the photographs, I invite you to reinterpret these structures – as places of surrender, restitution, and sacrifice. This underground cathedral of crisis reveals a desperate attempt to stabilise an ecological balance eroded by decades of extractive growth. It is a form of geo-engineering born of necessity rather than confidence: a reactive response, not an expression of mastery. What appears monumental is, in fact, fragile. What seems permanent is already insufficient.

Today, cities across the globe are constructing similar infrastructures in a paradoxical effort to preserve environmental conditions they have themselves destabilised. These projects mark a new phase of the Anthropocene – defined less by conquest over nature than by the urgent management of accumulated damage. The result is a reversed sublime, in which the scale of human intervention exposes not power, but vulnerability.

So once more, the question returns:
What does it take to keep the world in unison? These are the questions that matter most – yet they are increasingly overshadowed by the same momentum of progress that brought us here.