New Lands
Soils of Sand, Silt, and Scrap
Laura Cipriani (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
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Abstract
Coastal land reclamation is the process of turning water into land. Historically, humans reclaimed land to expand ports, defend territories, and convert unhealthy wetlands for agricultural or urban development. Yet, what once was an act of survival or growth has become a planetary phenomenon-a human-driven geological process that reshapes the edges of continents. Today, amid a climate crisis and rising seas, we continue to expand into the ocean, transforming water into land as if fighting the tide of our own making. This book begins with that paradox: the desire to create land while the planet itself is losing it. Through micro-stories, field observations, and personal encounters, it explores how places and people are changed by reclamation. It examines the materials that construct these new territories-sand, silt, scrap-and the systems that move them across borders. It questions what types of worlds we are creating on this unstable ground, and what it means, in the twenty-first century, to stand on land that did not exist before.
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