Towards an Urban Political Ecology of Coastal Land Reclamation

ABSTRACT Coasts, deltas and estuaries have been reshaped for generations by land reclamation projects for the purposes of expanding settlements and agricultural lands as well as protecting coasts. Since the mid‐twentieth century, technical progress has allowed for land reclamation to occur at an unprecedented speed and scale. Regardless of the key role that land reclamation has had in the past as well as in more recent coastal urbanisation efforts, the issue has received insufficient attention from human geographers, urban political ecologists and marine social scientists. In this paper, I aim to advance the land reclamation research by suggesting a new conceptual framework that combines concepts and empirical insights from urban political ecology (UPE), anthropology, political geography and political economy. This approach considers the representational, legal and material dimensions of urban coastal mega‐projects and helps to identify those who benefit and those who lose due to land reclamation. I conclude that a focus on land reclamation can help to understand that ‘land’ is a fundamental requirement for urbanisation. Land in coastal cities is not ‘out there’; it has to be created. To investigate the making of land requires integrating the often‐neglected coastal geomorphologies, marine sites of sediment extraction and understanding how they are discursively shaped and transformed by human interventions on urban coasts into UPE.