Terra-Sorta-Firma

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GLOBAL SAND TRADE The market for mined sand has become a billion-dollar annual business, growing at 10 percent a year since 2008. This has spawned a massive global sand trade both legal and illicit. Its legal trade is estimated at $70 billion per year with a global annual sand consumption in excess of 15 billion tons. Because of rapid urbanization, sand is beginning to procure a condition of scarcity affecting coastal real estate expansion policies, land values, and even territorial geopolitics. China, Singapore, and the UAE are the largest importers of sand.

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Terra-Sorta-Firma

Published on Mar 8, 2021

Actar Publishers

Terra-Sorta-Firma: Reclaiming the Littoral Gradient. By Fadi Masoud For centuries, cities have grown and expanded onto previously saturated grounds; “reclaiming” land from estuaries, marshes, mangroves, and seabeds. While these artificial coastlines are sites of tremendous real estate, civic, and infrastructural investments, they are also the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Terra-Sorta-Firma documents the global extent of reclaimed coastal lands, and provides a framework for comparison across varying geographies, cultures, and histories. It renders visible the ubiquity and precarity of urban coastal reclamation in an age of increased environmental and economic indeterminacy. The five parts of the book question urbanism’s political, economic, and physical binary relationship to wet and dry grounds in search of a new understanding of land in a state of permanent flux.

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