Planetary urbanization of sand - A preliminary research strategy

Description

The city’s material skeleton is founded on extraction of sand. The United Nations Environment Program considers sand the “unrecognized foundational material of our economies” (UNEP 2019, 2). Sand is a key component of built environments – from residential and office space to production facilities, infrastructure and leisure space (Dawson 2021). There is sand in electronics, the buildings we live and work in, the roads we drive on, the pavements we walk on, the glass we drink from and the windows we look out through. Sand is a ubiquitous yet somewhat invisible ingredient of modern life. But it is not an unlimited resource (Beiser 2018). Sand and gravel are currently estimated to be – right after water – the most extracted and consumed material worldwide (Krausmann et. al. 2018). From an urban metabolism perspective, ecosystems are regenerated through specific regulatory processes shaped by complex relationships of reciprocity, exchange and redistribution. The constantly increasing scale of capital involved in nature-society interactions has over the past two centuries intensified the metabolic demands on nature.
That we are now living in an ‘urban age’ has become a mantra in academic, political and journalistic discourse. This claim, however, is not a neutral statement (Brenner 2019). The promise of ostensible high-tech, smart, green and sustainable cities has namely been forwarded as the solution to climate change challenges. In the process, both ocean and land based natural resources (e.g. sand) are extracted to produce ‘sustainable’ urban landscapes – while producing other additional sustainability challenges. This development has given rise to societal and academic calls for improved understandings of contemporary urbanization and practices that can better safeguard the environment and climate interests in urban development.
We respond to these calls and aim to critically explore the uneven socio-ecological metabolism of operational urban landscapes, highlighting the of extractive practices beyond the city. We specifically do this by ‘following the sand’ from sites of extraction, through processes of circulation, and to sites of use. This paper follows up on the calls within both rural and urban studies regarding the need to supersede the urban/rural divide in order to better elucidate contemporary processes of socio-spatial transformations and their implications. This means that analyzing urbanization processes and their implications today, theoretically and empirically takes us far beyond the “city”. This project contributes to this theoretical challenge through the intersection of theories on planetary urbanization, and (feminist) political ecology.

Co-authored with:
Louise Fabian (Aarhus University)
Vasna Ramasar, Mads Barbesgaard , Muriel Côte, Anna-Klara Norlin, Yahia Mahmoud (Lund University)

Period	23 Oct 2023
Event title	9th International conference of critical geographies: Territorialities in resistance in the face of extractivism: Geographies from below and on the left
Event type	Conference
Conference number	9
Location	Mexico City, MexicoShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International