A perspicacious and beautiful article in the last issue of the Harvard Design Magazine featuring the Southeast Asian sand crisis in the context of Singapore, that doesn’t wilfully misunderstand or villify or jump to facile and tired old conclusions about consumption or growth.
“The challenge of sand is shifting and particular to each site. It articulates a nightmare both old and new: a radically liberated state, free of stabilizing ideologies such as soil and ground. Sand is an unstable and promiscuous alternative, quickly drained of historical and geographical traces. Perhaps it is telling that in Hebrew “sand” and “secular” are homonyms. It holds allegiances to no nation, no religion. Its form is transience. The fear goes: there is no more land; there is only sand.”
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“To make matters more turbid, the nightmare of coastal reclamation occupies an imaginary and regulatory space created by several misunderstandings about territory itself. These become urgent against both the backdrop of our “oceanic” moment and the apparent dissolution of that idyll of 19th- and 20th-century geopolitical thought, the grounded state. First among these misconceptions is that territory is a finite and intransigent thing. A longstanding myth of the state, propagated by realist and idealist schools of international relations alike, is the solidity of physical boundaries. […] The difficulty of sand likewise relies on a second error of territorial thought: the reified belief in the state as a unitary actor with sole control over its own space.That is, the state is mistaken for an object, rather than a web of processes.”
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The island’s expansion has been a colossal undertaking. It is not merely a matter of coastal reclamation: Singapore is growing vertically as well as horizontally. This means that the nation’s market needs fine river sand—used for beaches and concrete—as well as coarse sea sand to create new ground. And the ground must be solid, as the lion’s share of Singapore’s architecture is high-rise. Foreign sand and aggregate, along with foreign labor, are essential in replicating the island’s ground in the sky. […] For Singapore’s government, sand security is a safeguard of the state’s right to development. It is a precondition of fiscal and political survival. Sand, like money, must remain liquid for the economy to keep moving. The vulnerability of the island, its entropic tendency toward general decline, has long been imagined as a byproduct of its physical limits. […] Paradoxically, the management of coastal risk comes to greatly affect the territory’s interior.
The large tracts of land dedicated to storing sand and gravel aggregate become securitized sites—their area is taken “off the map.” The interior is leveraged such that the coast may grow.
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