Terra-Sorta-Firma by Actar Publishers

TERRA SORTA FIRMA RECLAIMING THE LITTORAL GRADIENT

FADI MASOUD

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. IT CHALLENGES DESIGNERS, DEVELOPERS, POLICYMAKER, ENGINEERS, AND URBANISTS TO RECONSIDER THE DESIGN AND CONSTRUCTION OF LAND ITSELF, AND TO RE-IMAGINE THIS MOST FUNDAMENTAL OF ALL INFRASTRUCTURES ALONG A GRADIENT OF INUNDATION.

TERRA SORTA FIRMA

FOR CENTURIES, CITIES HAVE GROWN AND EXPANDED ONTO PREVIOUSLY SATURATED GROUNDS; “RECLAIMING” LAND FROM ESTUARIES, MARSHES, MANGROVES, AND SEA-BEDS. 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.

FADI MASOUD FOREWORD BY

BRENT D. RYAN

TERRA SORTA FIRMA RECLAIMING THE LITTORAL GRADIENT

Table of Contents

4 6 8 11

Acknowledgments Foreword By Brent D. Ryan Introduction By Fadi Masoud

Global Sand Trade and the International Dredging Market Shoreline Management Catalogue The Land is Sand The Value of Sand

22 29 36 44

I. Sand Narratives: Politics and Performance of Creating Artificial Terrains

II. Atlas: Urban District on Reclaimed Land

50 52 54 56 58 60 62 64 66

Claiming Territory Venice Beemster Polder Flevopolder Malé Singapore Île Notre-Dame Treasure Island Key West

68 70 72 74 76 78

Geologic Necessity Mexico City Amsterdam Centrum San Francisco Bay Area The Embarcadero Hong Kong + Kowloon

80 84 86 88 90 92

Manhattan Mumbai Flamengo Park Solidere - Zaitunay Bay New Orleans Almere Centrum

94 96 98 100 102 104 106 108 110 112 114 116

Flamboyant Real-Estate Lusail The Pearl Dubai Waterfront Biscayne Bay Islands +Miami Beach Bayou Vista + Tiki Island Forest City Songdo Eko Atlantic City Jakarta Waterfront Abu Dhabi Waterfront Jurong Island

118 120 122 124 126 128 130 132 134 136 138

Landscaped Brownfields Back Bay Fens Toronto Waterfront Sørenga + Aker Brygge Barangaroo The Battery + Brooklyn Bridge Park Hammarby Sjöstad Cinta Costera False Creek Borneo Sporenburg Kalvebod Brygge

258 140 142 144 146 148 150 152 154 156

Blue Collar /Brown Water Port of Rotterdam Tokyo Bay Royal Docks Silvertown Kobe Osaka Bay Belfast Harbour Port of Los Angeles Zeebrugge

158

III. The Chinese Sub-Atlas

160 168 190 192 194 196 200 206 212 218 226

Case Selection and Infographic Analysis China and Her Return to the Ocean Project Duration and Completion Project Agents Sequencing Programming Caofeidian Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-City Nanhui/Lingang Qianhai Phoenix Island

232

IV. Essays: Reclaiming the Littoral Gradient

234

Land Reclamation in Island Cities and the Enclosure of Public Space Charlottetown’s Climate Adaptation: Reclaiming Land ‘From’ or ‘For’ Water?

246

270 286 306

322 324

Global Garden City: Trans-Territorial Ecologies in Singapore Beyond Binaries in Urban Coastal Futures: The Case of Lagos - Nigeria Boston’s Shifting Ground in a Changing Climate Landscape Resilience Frameworks for Urbanism on Reclaimed Land Authors Credits

FOREWORD By Brent D. Ryan

City making is a timeless, universal, and costly process. Substantial urban tissues of stone, pavement, steel, and glass reflect tremendous investments in material, capital, labor, and time. Thus historic and contemporary cities mirror each other in their accumulation of wealth and materials, in their occupation of terrains, in their consumption of aggregates as economic growth necessitates it. Cities locate in areas of strategic socio-economic value, as Jacobs (1968) noted long ago, cities are located near water, at the interface between resource (land) and market (water, or those across the water). A paradox of the human condition: the interface between land and water is that single point most necessary for city economies to occur, and it is also one of nature’s most malleable boundaries - forever in flux, shifting back and forth across seasons, storms, epochs. Cities fix in place a system in flux. The act of urbanism, construction and design of cities, need harden, make useful, this land-water edge. Or, in time, to shift it outward or to keep it in place. Landmaking occurs not because the city respects natural processes, but because human desires for trade, food, or money require that those processes be overcome. Like cities themselves, landmaking also reflects technology, energy, and power. Early landmaking, like early cities, was incremental, as gradual as the needs and growth of cities and urban regions were. Holland and Venice, perhaps the West’s most well-known landmaking centers even made land on a seasonal basis, according to labor, weather, and material availability. Dense, crowded cities crept outward into the water, with capillary canals remaining as the water’s mark on land. Today, landmaking, like other forms of environmental alteration and exploitation, has exploded in scale. Antarctica, gradually calving into the ocean, is the only continent not expanding through the now well-established process of dredging, spraying, packing, and building sand onto a harbor floor or former marshlands. And in another form of consonance between citymaking and landmaking, the glassy skyscraper, avatar of modernity and of global visibility for countries seeking their place, has been joined by the iconic landmade islands. Dubai and Lagos have even fused the two, constructing iconic skyscrapers atop such islands. Such “iconic” islands represent the fusion of digital and physical culture, feeding the global need for image consumption and a city’s need for tourism, trade, or tax-sheltering elites. City making and landmaking are inexorable, but they are also an arc that reflects a society’s economic growth rate, as well as its tolerance of environmental degradation and violation. San Francisco Bay is mostly filled, but one can also see the end of the line, the precise point where bulldozers stopped in 1972 when the Clean Water Act forbade the

7 “discharge of dredged or fill materials into wetlands and other waters” (USGS 2002). That Act effectively ended landmaking in the United States. Almost fifty years later, China did the same, heavily restricting land reclamation on “mudflats” (Mongabay 2018) as part of an environmental protection measure. Projects like Caofeidian or Tianjin Eco-City, still mostly empty at the time of writing (2020), may be the last of their generation, a ghost of China’s “glorious forty years” of economic boom. Yet landmaking is far from over. Sea level rise looms on the horizon, and new types of artificial islands or urban districts may be a costly but effective way to keep storm surges at bay, to wall off valuable financial districts, and to restore damaged littoral ecologies. Whether in the form of the spectacular garuda projected for Jakarta bay, waterfront parks in Toronto or New York City, or the subtle dune islands proposed for Europe and the American northeast, landmaking appears to be at the edge of a semiotic transition from sinner to savior, from the destroyer of natural habitat, bane of endangered species, to the preserver of human and animal life. Whether this semiosis conveys a shift in humanity’s relationship with the world, an acceleration of sustainability, remains to be seen. The research in this book, the result of four years’ work at MIT and the University of Toronto, displays, analyzes, and explains the interwoven processes of citymaking and landmaking in over fifty cities around the world. The narratives revealed are multifarious and often surprising, revealing how many coastal cities have taken part in landmaking at some point during their history, including Los Angeles and Montreal. Some of the made land is beautiful, an ornament to its city, such as Rio’s Flemengo Park; others like Panama’s recently constructed Cinta Costera, are a blight, conceptually derived from the twentieth century rather than the twenty-first. A special ‘sub-atlas’ within the book focuses on China, whose extremely rapid growth and concentration of coastal cities made it a locus for landmaking between 1990 and 2020, and the site of some of the most spectacular urban expansions, new city districts, and even new cities on the planet. China’s dramatic landmaking and terrain manipulation was the spur for much of the early research that comprised this book. As water increasingly moves onto land, reclaiming areas that were once its own, the shift of land onto water through landmaking may come to seem a quixotic enterprise. Perhaps a move in the wrong direction in an age when adaptation, not manipulation, is the norm. But this would be to underestimate landmaking’s potential. Who knows at what rate coastlines will change in the decades to come? And who knows, indeed, what new types, sites, and forms of landmaking will come to be needed, in the coming age when cities will be, in all likelihood, more aqueous than ever? As terra firma becomes, as Fadi Masoud has so memorably stated, terra-sorta-firmas, the atlas of landmaking so beautifully portrayed in this book will be a useful marker, not only of cities that have edges receding back to water, but of our relationship to a littoral edge that has always been, and will be in flux. Let your explorations begin!

References: Jacobs 1968. The Economy of Cities. USGS 2002. https://water.usgs.gov/nwsum/WSP2425/legislation.html Mongabay 2018. https://news.mongabay.com/2018/05/a-boon-for-birds-once-overlooked-chinas-mudflats-gain-protections/

I. SAND NARRATIVES POLITICS AND PERFORMANCE OF CREATING ARTIFICIAL TERRAINS

Sand mining boats work illegally on the Thane Creek in Maharashtra, India. Workers dive to the bottom with a metal bucket to scoop sand; the boat crew hauls it to the surface.

Coastal plains comprise about 8% of the surface of the Earth, and are among the world’s most densely populated and most industrialized areas. Today about half the world’s population lives within 100 km of a coast or an estuary, where eight out of the ten largest metropolitan regions are currently situated. Naturally, coastlines are shaped through time by the processes of erosion and accretion where they play a pivotal role for a robust economy and natural defense. Coastal land reclamation is not a modern phenomenon, but the pace, scale, and ubiquity are. Forty billion tons of sand per year goes into urban development – twice the amount of sediment carried by all the worlds’ rivers combined. In large quantities, sand is engineered into the most fundamental of all infrastructures and a precursor to any building project – land itself. The reality of excessive land expansion is largely co-mingled with the extreme rates of sand extraction, both legally and illegally, and which are exceeding natural sand replenishment rates. Construction technology and abundant reservoirs of sand are major factors enabling land reclamation. The opening chapter catalogs the processes of land reclamation, illustrated by diagrams for dredging technologies, spatial dynamics, and shoreline management and protection. In parallel, we examine the patterns of global sand trade together with the distribution of human populations along coastlines, the availability and allocation of sand grain for reclamation and construction, and the demand for the resource. This chapter preludes and cross-references various landfill techniques in the selected cases throughout the atlas.

UK, Germany, Germa France Appro App roox. ro x. = 6%

No Norway Appro App rox. = 13%

ox.

Vietnam Appro App roox. ro x. = 8%

China Apprrrooox. App x. 1/5 of Wold’s Sand Import

Taiwan T aiwan Appro roox. ro x. = 3% Japan Appro roox. ro x. = 3%

Australia Appro roox. ro x. = 5%

. = 13%

United States Appro roox. ro x. = 55%

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.

20 Land Reclamation The International Association of Dredging Companies (IADC) defines land reclamation as the process of creating new land by raising the elevation of a waterbed, or low-lying land, or by pumping water out of muddy morass areas. This be achieved by poldering or by raising the elevation of a seabed or low-lying land by earth movement (mechanical dredging) or hydraulic filling.

ista

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(siz eo

Containment Dike

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Underwater Silt Screen Ocean Soft Sediment Bedrock

Hydraulic Dredging

Low Targ Delivery through bottom Reclaimed Land

San

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rea

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abil

ity in

Vic in

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rce

of S

and Transport Vessels Mechanical Bucket Dredger Underwater Silt Screen Ocean Soft Sediment Oceanic Crust

Mechanical Dredging

STAGE 00: Original Site Underwater

Targ

ete

Hig

rea

and

STAGE 01: Containment Dike & Sand Filling

Ava il

abil

ity in

Vic in

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ista

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(siz eo

f dr edg

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Underwater Silt Screen

Ocean Soft Sediment

Oceanic Crust

STAGE 02: Drain Reclaimed Area

Bedrock

STAGE 03: Sowing Reeds by Aircraft

Drainage Canal

Reeds at New Ground

Drainage Pipes

Underwater Silt Screen Ocean Soft Sediment Bedrock

Ocean Soft Sediment Bedrock

STAGE 05: After 15 years, polder is ready for crops, and building

STAGE 04: Burning Reeds to Enduce Ground Fertility Burning Reeds

Ocean Soft Sediment

Bedrock

22 SHORELINE MANAGEMENT CATALOGUE Facing the constant powerful forces from wind, waves, and currents urbanism on reclaimed land requires immense shoreline management and engineering efforts.

Coastal Forces Impact Pattern

Typical Strategy for Stabilization

23 Structural Management Concrete Levee Mitigation for: Strong sea currents perpendicular to shoreline Before Intervention

After Intervention

pla

d loo

t ula

Are

Flo

Coastline Steepness: Low

Sea Level Fluctuation Soft Sediment

Are

Concrete Levee Flood Water Level Mean Sea Level

Flood Water Level Mean Sea Level Storm Currents

la dp

t ula

Storm Currents Level of Concrete Levee

Coastline Steepness: Low

Sea Level Fluctuation Soft Sediment

Oceanic Crust

Structural Management Revetment Mitigation for: Strong sea currents perpendicular to shoreline Before Intervention

Coastal Erosion Flood Water Level Mean Sea Level Storm Currents

Sea Level Fluctuation Soft Sediment Oceanic Crust

After Intervention

Revement protecting from coastal erosion (stone, concrete, or asphalt)

s & in rea pla A od ted Flo pula Po

Flood Water Level Mean Sea Level

Coastline Steepness: High

Storm Currents

Sea Level Fluctuation Soft Sediment Oceanic Crust

s & in rea pla A od ted Flo pula Po

Coastline Steepness: High

THE LAND IS SAND Vince Beiser

Palm Jumierah in Dubai UAE completed in 2006 is approximetly 560 hectares.

No discussion about land reclamation would be complete without considering its most basic building block, the most important solid substance on Earth: sand. That’s right, sand. Trivial though those little grains may seem, sand is the main material that modern cities are made of. It is to cities what flour is to bread, what cells are to our bodies: the invisible but fundamental ingredient that makes up the bulk of the built environment in which most of us live. Sand is at the core of our daily lives. Look around you right now. Is there a floor beneath you, walls around, a roof overhead? Chances are excellent they are made at least partly out of concrete. And what is concrete? It’s essentially just sand and gravel glued together with cement. Take a glance out the window. All those other buildings you see are also made from sand. So is the glass in that window. So are the miles of asphalt roads that connect all those buildings. So are the silicon chips that are the brains of your laptop and smartphone. If you’re in downtown San Francisco, in lakefront Chicago, or at Hong Kong’s international airport, the very ground beneath you is likely artificial, manufactured with sand dredged up from underwater. Sand has been used for construction since at least the time of the ancient Egyptians. In the 15th century, an Italian artisan figured out how to turn sand into fully transparent glass, which made possible the microscopes, telescopes, and other technologies that helped drive the Renaissance’s scientific revolution.

THE VALUE OF SAND Atelier NL

“This is the Anthropocene, the geological epoch of the global influence of man on his planet. It’s an epoch we have got ourselves into in large part because of the profound disconnect in our awareness of the fundamental relationships between what we want and where it comes from. We have lost the ties between materials and communities, we have no narratives for our stuff. Our earth – our home – is a system and everything is connected, yet we live and think in isolated compartments and the very idea of a ‘holistic’ approach is hardly mainstream. –Michael Welland, British Geologist & Sand Specialist

Exhibition To See a World in a Grain of Sand, Van Abbe Museum (Blickfänger).

So, what is to be done? There are no simple answers, no overnight fixes, but surely we can, step by step, rebuild the bridges between our daily lives and the resources that the earth provides, re-make connections, raise awareness. Have you ever looked closely at a grain of sand? Imagined it as a small part of the world, coming from somewhere, going someplace, with its very own story to tell? It is estimated that there are as many grains of sand on the earth as there are stars in the universe. Coming from far away places throughout the world, the journey of a grain of sand is guided by water, wind, and ice over time. Sand is an invaluable natural resource that surrounds us everyday, no matter where we are on earth. By a combination of earthly processes such as geology, chemistry, and physics, the small granules have been continuously shaping for billions of years. While sand is one of the planet’s most abundant materials, its current rate of excavation far exceeds the speed at which it can renew itself. This has resulted in what scientists and sand specialists have termed a Global Sand Scarcity: a crisis which threatens our way of life as we know it today. Sand is used to construct our roads, homes, hospitals, and schools, it’s in our food and medicine, and is where we source minerals such as iron, platinum, gold, and titanium. Additionally, up to 50 billion tons per year is blockaded behind hydroelectric

II. ATLAS: URBAN DISTRICTS ON RECLAIMED LAND

Land reclamation has been a part of urban expansion and transformation for centuries. In most cases it was deemed a necessity and systematically linked to broader hydrological and infrastructural networks. In other, more recent cases it is a speculative real-estate practice that results in outlandish formal schemes. The Atlas showcases projects and districts from a diverse global and historical perspective. The Atlas illustrates the progression of each site and traces it back from its current condition to its original hydrological state (pre-infill), highlighting each district’s socio-economic, architectural, infrastructural, and cultural contexts.

San Francisco Bay Area California, USA 18,040 sq km* 244 years

Mexico City Mexico 1,485 sq km* 501 years

Tokyo Bay, Japan 256.8 sq km 130 years

Yas Island & Al Lulu Island Abu Dhabi, UAE 223.5 sq km* 30 years

Enlarge x5

Total Area

(No *) Reclaimed Area

Flevopolder Netherlands 935.2 sq km 78 years

New Orleans Louisiana, USA

Singapore Singapore 217.8 sq km 195 years

Jakarta Bay, Jakarta, Indonesia 105.9 sq km* 4 years

906.1 sq km* 302 years

CLAIMING TERRITORY RECLAMATION PROJECTS OF REGIONAL, MILITARY, AND POLITICAL SIGNIFICANCE –NATION BUILDING ENDEAVORS

VENICE

Venice, Italy

After enduring frequent land-based attacks from Germanic Lombards, the Doge founded the city of Venice in 810 AD when he moved his capital from nearby Lido (Malamocco) to a series of grassy islets in the Venetian Lagoon. Building outwards, the early Venetians began reclaiming the edges of the islands using mud dredged from the channels and wooden piles until only narrow canals separated the islands. The main tidal channel between the islets became the Grand Canal, and eventually the island cluster obtained its fish-like shape seen today. Due to its location, Venice flourished as central Europe’s gateway to eastern trading powers, such that by the 13th century, it became the most prosperous city in Europe. Nevertheless, its failure as a colonial power saw the city’s decline into the 1700s. During the 19th and early 20th centuries with the arrival of new motorway, port, and rail connections to the city, Venice re-emerged as a major tourist destination. Today, its iconic topography of reclaimed islands and picturesque canals forms the basis of Venice’s tourism industry. Site Boundary Water

Area: 415 sq km Project Date: Begun 5th Century Population: 60,000 historic city, 264,579 total Density: 600/sq km Body of Water: Adriatic Sea

Wetland Forest Recreational Green Space Beach Built Environment

810 AD

1617

1945

2007

2017

2 km

BEEMSTER POLDER Beemster, Netherlands

During the 16th and 17th centuries, Amsterdam emerged as a major centre of international trade and the seat of a powerful new merchant class. Over the following two centuries, as a result of improved windmill and water pumping technologies, private investors began draining peat lakes across the Netherlands to create leasable land over which they could acquire lordship. The first of these projects was De Beemster, a large peat lake in North Holland, drained by a group of 123 private investors from Amsterdam and the Hague between 1609 and 1612. The polder, which was drained using four tiers of forty-three terraced windmills, created 207 new farms and over 50 lavish new estates on nutrient rich peat soil below sea level. Still an agricultural landscape, the Beemster polder has remained largely intact for over 400 years and is now a UNESCO world heritage site. Water is continually pumped out of the polder to prevent flooding.

Site Boundary Water

Area: 72 sq km Project Date: 1500 Population: 8,729 Body of Water: Beemster

Wetland Reclaimed Land Built Environment

1300

1400

1600

1800

2000

5 km

GEOLOGIC NECESSITY LIMITED BY STEEP TERRAINS, TIDAL MARSHLANDS, OR BOTH – THESE URBAN DISTRICTS EMERGED AS A RESULT OF URBAN PRESSURE IN CITIES WITH IMMENSE GEOLOGIC LIMITATIONS

MEXICO CITY Mexico City, Mexico

The city of Mexico-Tenochtitlan was founded by the Mexica people in 1325. Constructed in the middle of Lake Texcoco, the Aztecs first developed what is now known as Mexico City in the middle of brackish shallow lake, a location that would make it easiest to defend. At the time of Spanish conquests, Mexico City was one of the world’s largest urban centers. By 1519, the Spanish began a campaign of lake draining and groundwater pumping to rectify issues of flooding and expand the urban territory. This resulted in land subsidence of an enormous magnitude, which affects Mexico City to this day. Factors such as booming population growth, the weight of tall buildings, and the city’s inability to replenish groundwater has resulted in Mexico City sinking by more than 10 metres in 100 years. To solve this issue, there are plans to re-expose porous lava rock currently covered by impervious pavement. This highly porous ground condition would act as a sponge during rain events, thereby reducing the risk of flooding as well as replenishing the groundwater table.

Area: 1,485 sq km Project Date: 1519 Population: 21 million Body of Water: N/A

Water

Built Environment

Recreational Open Space

Site Boundary

Reclaimed Land

1930

1974

1994

2017

20 km

AMSTERDAM CENTRUM North Holland, Netherlands The Netherlands has a long and well documented history of land reclamation projects dating back to the Middle Ages. Farmers in the 11th century settled in peat swamps and other low lying areas, and began modifying the landscape by installing drainage ditches to create productive agricultural land. Today, Amsterdam has more than 100 kilometres of navigable canals. In the early 17th century, at the peak of Dutch global trade and colonization, a comprehensive plan was developed that was based on four concentric half-circles of canals. The canals served for defence, water management and transport. Amsterdam-Centrum is the inner-most borough and historical city centre of Amsterdam, containing the majority of the city’s landmarks with approximately 85,000 inhabitants living on 400 hundred years of urban fill.

Site Boundary

Area: 5,206 sq km Project Date: Begun 16th Century Population: 1.3 million Urban Areas Density: 4,908/sq km Body of Water: North Sea

Water Wetland Reclaimed Land Built Environment

1736

1941

2017

5 km

FLAMBOYANT REAL-ESTATE DEVELOPER-DRIVEN, SPECULATIVE, AND INSTANTANEOUS WATERFRONT URBANISM PROMISING ECONOMIC AND ENVIRONMENTAL RICHES ON RECLAIMED LANDS

LUSAIL Doha, Qatar

Located immediately north of the capital city of Doha, Lusail is a waterfront development envisioned to house approximately 450,000 people. Its development includes both waterfront development as well as the construction of the Qetaidan Islands set to contain tourist attractions as well as luxury residential and commercial units. As part of Qatar’s Vision 2030 master plan, this new community is designed to establish a sustainable and diversified economy. Although the development of Lusail includes stipulations for environmental protection and sustainable growth, the adverse effects of land reclamation projects along the coast of Qatar are seen in the decline of marine life. Water turbidity is greater along marinas, solid material pollution has increased, and fish populations have dramatically declined. As a result, scientists aim to raise awareness of the unintended consequence of shoreline expansion and development.

Area: 38 sq km Project Date: 2006-2019 Construction Cost: Est. $45 billion Population: 260,000 (short-term est.) Body of Water: Persian Gulf

Water

Reclaimed Land

Parks+Greenfield

Built Environment

Wetland+Marsh

Site Boundary

2002

2006

2008

2014

2017

5 km

THE PEARL Doha, Qatar

The Pearl-Qatar is an artificial island constructed off the West Bay Lagoon in Doha, south of the planned city of Lusail. It is the first land on Qatari soil that was made available for ownership by foreign nationals. The city is designed to contain 12,000 luxury residential units as well as comercial districts. The name for the project is derived from the area’s historical use as a major pearl diving site and is designed to resemble a string of pearls. The island was created through the use of a 10,000 horsepower cutter-suction dredgers, which excavated soil, gravel, and rock from Persian Gulf. Approximately 15 million m3 of land has been excavated and reclaimed for the creation of the island. The development of The Pearl is said to preserve and enhance environmental conditions through the creation of new shorelines that provide opportunities for marine life to grow.

Area: 4 sq km Project Date: 2004-2018 Construction Cost: $15 billion Additional Shoreline: 32 km Population: 45,000 (2018) Density: 11,250/ sq km Development Type: Residential, Commercial, Recreation Body of Water: Persian Gulf

Site Boundary Water Parks+Greenfield Wetland+Marsh Reclaimed Land Built Environment

1980

1990

1999

2004

2006

2017

5 km

118

LANDSCAPED BROWNFIELDS PROJECTS THAT DEPLOY LANDSCAPE AND ENVIRONMENTAL DESIGN STRATEGIES FOR THE TRANSFORMATION OF POSTINDUSTRIAL SITES

119

120

BACK BAY FENS Boston, USA

Surrounded by brackish marshes, Boston was described by early settlers as “wild and dangerous”. As settlement increased, low laying lands surrounding the high points created from glacial erosion and moraine deposits became an increasingly valuable resource. The area’s reputation as a derelict landscape exacerbated its use as a dumping ground for garbage and human waste, further decreasing the health of the marshes and increasing human health risks. As a result of increased pollution and the need to accommodate the growing population, Boston’s shoreline was greatly expanded to accommodate harbor improvements, bury pollution from wastewater, and increase public health. The Emerald Necklace and the Back Bay Fens designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, generated a series of connected public parks that mimced the original marshes, regulated water flow, provided flood mitigation and enabled the construction of the Back Bay development between the Charles River and the Shawmut Peninsula.

Site Boundary Water

Area: 4.5 sq km Project Date: 1857-1895 Population: 685,094 (Boston 2017) Body of Water: Charles River

Recreational Green Space Reclaimed Land Built Environment

121

1802

1875

1895

2017

2.5 km

122

TORONTO WATERFRONT Toronto, Canada Originally one of the most productive wetlands of the Great Lakes, the marshes at the mouth of the Don River were rapidly degraded by the 1800s. Regular dumping of sewage, garbage, and livestock carcasses into the Don River transformed the marshlands into a source of stench and disease. At the beginning of the 20th century, with ambitions to transform the city into a major deep water port, the new Toronto Harbour Commission initiated its Port Lands Reclamation Project. This saw the marsh and adjacent islands reclaimed, stabilized, and reconfigured and connected to ship docks and rail lands also built on fill south of Front Street. The Commission’s ambition for a thriving port, was never realized however, its breakwater, the Leslie Street Spit is now considered one of the Great Lakes most ecologically sensitive aress. Today, the Portlands and the rest of the waterfront, is the site of major redevelopment centered around the restoration of the mouth of the Don River. Waterfront Toronto is mandated with the transformtion of 800 hectares of brownfield lands. The agency is leading the redevelopment with landscape and design excellence , as well as advocating for innovation, resilience, and robust public engagment. The project is one of the largest waterfront redevelopment initiatives ever undertaken in the world. Site Boundary Water

Area: 8.0 sq km Project Date: 1800Population: 65,913 (2016) Density: 8,943 / sq km Body of Water: Lake Ontario

Recreational Green Space Wetland Reclaimed Land Built Environment

123

1860

1912

1930

1960

2017

2.5 km

140

BLUE COLLAR BROWN WATER PORT LANDS AND INDUSTRIAL BROWNFIELD SITES THAT ARE CRITICAL REGIONAL ECONOMIC ENGINES OF GLOBAL MARITIME TRADE

141

142

PORT OF ROTTERDAM Rotterdam, Netherlands The Port of Rotterdam has a long and ingenious history of land reclamations projects aimed at facilitating the continued development of one of the largest, longest running, and busiest ports in the world. Settled in 1270, the river Rotte was dammed to separate freshwater from saltwater, thereby permitting Rotterdam to establish itself as a port city. Lying below sea level, the Dutch have been managing their relationship to water since the 13th century. Continuing its history of shoreline expansion, the Maasvlakte 2 project aimed to further expand the port’s shoreline by over 2000 hectares. Using the same fleet of dredging ships that built Dubai’s Palm Islands, construction materials were gathered from the sea floor. Rotterdam consists of five port areas and three distribution parks that serve over 50,000,000 consumers. Today, the Port maintains its reputation as a hub of economic activity further facilitated by the continued expansion and development of the ports.

Area: 127 sq km Project Date: 1270-Present Population: 93,766 Density: N/A Body of Water: North Sea

Site Boundary Water Reclaimed Land Built Environment

143

1665

1850

1937

1965

2000

2017

10 km

144

TOKYO BAY Tokyo, Japan

Once a small fishing village nestled between two river estuaries, Edo became a bustling port city as early as the 1300s. Earnest port development, however, did not occur until the mid 1800s, when Meiji Japan overhauled much of its political, social, military, and economic policies to regain competitiveness over Western nations. At this time, Tokyo became the new capital of Japan, and a phased plan of dredging and land reclamation was put into action to modernize the medieval port. In 1923, a major earthquake devastated the region and its overland transportation network, resulting in a boom in shipping and port construction, such that Tokyo’s port gained international importance by 1941. Following Tokyo’s bombing in World War II, Japan prioritized the port’s full reconstruction and expansion as necessary for the re-establishment of domestic industry, and by 1971, regular shipping routes were established between Europe and the USA. Tokyo Bay includes about 249 km2 of reclaimed land area composed of aggregate household waste production that is rigorously sorted and turned into ash and further recycled into bay landfill. Today, the port serves Japan’s largest urban-industrial area, one of the major centres of the world economy. Area: 1,500 sq km Project Date: 1800s (Meiji Period) Development Type: Fishing Industry Body of Water: Pacific Ocean

Water

Reclaimed Land

Recreational Green Space

Built Environment

Wetland

Site Boundary

145

1594

1854

1945

1965

1985

2012

5 km

158

III. THE CHINESE SUB-ATLAS

159 With advantaged geographic location, copious economic opportunities, and large influxes of floating population, Chinese coastal cities have been planned as engines of local, regional, and national economic development. New developments in coastal cities have been bolstered with tremendous optimism. They are envisioned as the seed of a futuristic world to featuring new towns, new central business districts, ports, resorts, industrial parks and urban parks. Sustainability is supposedly achieved through building anew on artificial terrain and through equipping the new city with the most advanced technologies. In reality, we have witnessed vast areas of underutilized coastal lands that have replaced dynamic ecosystems that are waiting for speculative developments to commence. The actual outcomes of these developments are poorly accessed and barely investigated by design and planning practitioners. 21 projects representing major typologies of recent developments on reclaimed land such as eco-cities, new towns, low-carbon development, tourism development, industrial parks, and financial centers were selected. Located in a variety of geo-political contexts within China, the selected projects vary immensely in scale, scope, and completion status. This chapter documents the projects’ morphological and topological transformations over time. Five representative projects in four major regions along China’s coast from North to South: Bohai Bay, Yangzi River Delta, Pearl River Delta, and Hainan Province were studied further. The detailed case studies reflect unique geographic, ecological, socio-economic, and political characteristics in their regional contexts. 1. Caofeidian Industrial Park (+425 km2/2000-2020) 2. Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-city (31 km2 / 2015-2020) 3. Nanhui/Lingang New Town (315 km2 / 2005-2020) 4. Qianhai Port (15 km2/ 2010-2020 ) 5. Phoenix Island (0.5 km2/ 2012-2020)

160

100

CASE STUDY SELECTIONS

Lingang District

100

Caofeidian Industrial Zone Tianjin Eco-City

Longkou New Islands

Xuwei New Area

Dongtai Tiaozini Reclamation Project Dongtan Eco-City

100

Taihu New Town

Nanhui/Lingang New Town

100

Binhai New Town Yuhuan New Town

100

Shuangyu Island, Xiamen Bay Pilot Zone for Overseas Chinese Economic and Cultural Cooperation Overseas Chinese Town, Nanshan District Shenzhen Bay Park

Phoenix Island

100

N 100

South Sea Pearl Eco-Island

Shekou Industrial Zone Qianhai MSIC Zone Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge Islands Novos Aterros Urbanos

= case study

tion

Eco-city njin

ini Reclamation cheng ngsu

tive

gang New Town hanghai

ngyu Island amen Eco-city Fujian njin

161

From Left to Right: Lingang District, Changxing Island Caofeidian Industrial Zone Tianjin Eco-City

Changxing Lingang District Dalian Liaoning

Longkou New Islands Longkou Bay Shandong

Taihu New Town Wuxi Jiangsu

Binhai New Town Taizhou Zhejiang

Pilot Zone for Overseas Chinese Shantou Guangdong

Caofeidian Industrial Park Tangshan Shandong

Xuwei New Area Lianyungang Jiangsu

Dongtai Tiaozini Reclamation Yancheng Jiangsu

Dongtan Eco-city Shanghai Caofeidian Industrial Park Tangshan Shandong Yuhuan New Town Wenzhou Zhejiang

Overseas Chinese Town Shenzhen Xuwei New Area Guangdong Lianyungang Jiangsu

Tianjin Eco-city Tianjin

Nanhui/Lingang New Town Shanghai Tianjin Eco-city Tianjin Shuangyu Island Xiamen Fujian

Shenzhen Bay Park Shenzhen Guangdong

Xuwei New Area Longkou New Longkou Islands New Islands Longkou Bay Xuwei New Area Lianyungang Jiangsu Project Shandong Dongtai Tiaozini Reclamation

Dongtan Eco-City Taihu New Town Taihu New Town Eco-city Nanhui/Lingang Dongtan New Town Wuxi Shanghai Jiangsu

Binhai New Town Yuhuan New Town Shuangyu Island Yuhuan New Town Binhai New Town Wenzhou Taizhou Zhejiang Zhejiang Pilot Zone for Overseas Chinese ECC Overseas ChineseXuwei Town New Area Shenzhen Bay ParkLianyungang Jiangsu Pilot Zone for Overseas Chinese Town Overseas Chinese Shenzhen Shantou Guangdong Shekou Industrial Zone Guangdong Qianhai MSIC Zone

Dongtai Tia Ya J

Nanhui/Ling Sha

Shuan Xi F

Shenz S Gu

Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge Qianhai Modern Service H Shekou Industrial Zone Industry Cooperation Zone Shenzhen Nanhui/Ling Shenzhen Guangdong Sha Novos Aterros Urbanos Guangdong South Sea Pearl Eco-Island Phoenix Island

n Qianhai Service Modern Service Hong Kong - Zhuhai - Macau Bridge Shekou Industrial Zone rkBay Park Shekou Industrial Qianhai Modern Hong Kong - Zhuhai Macau Bridge Zone nzhen Cooperation Zone East Man-Made Shenzhen Industry Industry Cooperation Zone West andWest Eastand Man-Made Islands Islands Shenzhen ngdong Shenzhen Zhuhai Hong Kong Guangdong Shenzhen Zhuhai and Hongand Kong Guangdong Guangdong Guangdong Nanhui/Lingang New Town Shanghai dge Macau Novos Phoenix Island South Sea Pearl Eco-island ds Aterros Urbanos Sanya Haikou Bay Changxing Lingang District Macau Hainan Hainan Dalian Liaoning gang New Town

Macau Novos South Sea South Macau Novos PearlSea Ec Aterros Urbanos H Aterros Urbanos Haikou Bay Macau Macau Hainan

location

tive

South

hanghai

Overseas Chinese Town Shenzhen

Shekou Industrial Zone Shenzhen

Overseas Chinese Town Shenzhen Guangdong

Dongtai Tia Ya J

162

BOHAI BAY Yellow Sea Cold Semi-Arid / Humid / Warm Continental Climate Temperate Broadleaf and Mixed Forests Salinity: ~30‰ Avg temperature of water seasonally: -1°C (winter) ~ 28°C (summer) Avg temp of land seasonally: -2°C (winter) ~ 25°C (summer) Tidal extents: 2.5m average, 4m maximum Number of recorded hurricanes or typhoons: 51 (1550-1949), 29 (1950-1997) Wind patterns: NW in winter, SE in summer Wave patterns: primarily wind driven, average wave height 0.6m, maximum height 4-5m

163

164

YANGTZE RIVER DELTA East China Sea Monsoon Subtropical Climate Temperate Broadleaf and Mixed Forests Salinity: 2.5‰ (summer) ~ 12‰ (winter) Avg temperature of water seasonally: 16.5°C (winter) ~ 28.6°C (summer) Avg temp of land seasonally: 3.5°C (winter) ~ 27.8°C (summer) Tidal extents: 0.4-4m Number of recorded hurricanes or typhoons: 787 (1368-1911), Wind patterns: NW in winter, SE in summer, average speed 6.1m/s Wind driven and affected by estuary topography, average wave height 0.7m

165

168

169

CHINA AND HER RETURN TO THE OCEAN Lu Xiaoxuan

Introduction “Jingwei carries twigs in her mouth, to fill up the vast sea. — 精衛銜微木，將以填滄海。

Cranes laying pipelines along the newly paved roads.

In the summer of 2013, I drove from Beijing to Tianjin to photograph coastal fish farms and saltpans. As I headed south along the coast on National Expressway No.1, the urban cityscape dissolved into a wide rural landscape. According to Google Maps, there were fishponds all along the northwest side of the road and the coastline of Bohai Bay along the southeast side. However, the reality was I was surrounded by miles of open wasteland. I pressed forward until I spotted a number of construction cranes standing far away to the east. On closer investigation, I found that the cranes were being used to install pipelines across the “wasteland,” and brand-new roads stretched out towards the sea (Figure 1). According to Google Map, we were already 1 km out to sea in Bohai Bay. In fact, I was standing on so-called reclaimed land or “new territories,” not yet shown on the 2010 satellite map. The barren landscape changed as I continued along one of the roads stretching towards the ocean. At first it was covered with drifts of red leaved shrubs, which gradually thinned out as I proceeded, revealing alternate dry and waterlogged patches of ground. After a while the asphalt road surface gave way to a dirt causeway flanked by mudflats, serenaded by a multitude of water pumps gurgling and bubbling as if in celebration of the birth of a new area of land. It was only when Google Map informed me I was 10km away from the 2010 coastline that I caught sight of Bo-

170

171

2. Land reclaimed from coastal fish farms and salt pans now covered with swathes of red shrubs. 3. Alternate dry and waterlogged patches of ground along the road. 4. Water being pumped out to form new land along the coast. 5. Temporary steel piles along the outer edge of the newly reclaimed land. 6. Sand carrier barge approaching the land reclamation site.

hai Bay on the horizon. Rows of temporary steel piles littered the outer edge of this new land, crude weaponry ready for use in the next onslaught against the sea. Endless processions of barges chugged by as if bringing reinforcements to the battlefront between land and sea, every cargo of sand a death knell for the ocean. In his Thirteen Poems on Reading the Classic of Mountains and Seas (du shanhaijing shishan shou 讀山海經十三首), Tao Yuanming wrote: “Jingwei carries twigs in her mouth, to fill up the vast sea.”1 Today, instead of the twigs that Jingwei carried in her mouth, sand and stone are the materials used to fill the sea and expand China’s 18,000 km coastline, where reclamation on a massive scale is proceeding at an unprecedented rate. Intensifying urban development and attracting foreign investment have become the key benchmarks for economic and political advancement, and many cities are extending into the sea to make space for housing, industry, and agriculture. 23 of the world’s 45 largest areas of reclaimed land are in China, with Tianjin New Port and the Caofeidian Industrial Complex in Bohai Bay, Nanhui New City in the Yangtze River Delta, and Qianhai Port in the Pearl River Delta leading the way.2 In 2015, at least 11 coastal provinces and 39 coastal municipalities were conducting decade-long land reclamation projects approved and supported by the central government.3 Promoted with high hopes of stimulating economic growth, we have instead witnessed the sacrifice of dynamic and productive ecosystems on a monstrous scale for the sake of vast areas of engineered, now idle land awaiting the chimera of speculative development. We should bear in mind two important points as we seek to understand the current speed and scale of land reclamation in China. First, this land reclamation should not be considered to be a pragmatic solution to land shortage. Unlike the Netherlands, Japan, or Singapore, there is no fundamental “lack of land” issue in China. Second, land reclamation and associated development has only comparatively recently been driven by profit. In fact, China has a long history of shaping and reshaping its littoral territories, given that it has one of the longest coastlines in the world and the wide, flat and rich estuaries of the Yellow, Yangtze, and Pearl Rivers have been centers of human population and activity for millennia. In light of these points, this article aims to explain the rationale behind the sudden and extremely rapid escalation of land reclamation along China’s coastline since the beginning of the new millennium. Focusing

190 PROJECT DURATION AND COMPLETION XI Jinping

HU Jintao Building a harmonious society

North

New Normal

CENTRAL LEADERSHIP

NORHERN PROVINCE 2005 03

2010 07

2015 12

2020 17

2025 22

2030 27

29 (km2) 100

Lingang District, Changxing Island

BOHAI BAY

Dalian, Liaoning

100

253

LIAONING

100 100

452

Caofeidian Industrial Park

100 100 100

Tangshan, Hebei

149.5

HEBEI

TOTAL PL

100

> 5,880 k > 99.5 tim

100 100

Tianjin Eco-city

100

Tianjin

215 92 520 345 1,800

TIANJIN

Longkou New Islands Longkou Bay, Shandong

100 100 100 100 100 100 100

SHANDONG

100 100

Xuwei New Area Lianyungang, Jiangsu

100 100 100 100 100

DENG Xiaoping pment is the absolute principle

100 100

Yancheng, Jiangsu

100 100 100

Taihu New Town Wuxi, Jiangsu

JIANGSU

100 100 100

Shanghai

1,747

Nanhui/Lingang New Town

400

100 100 100 100 100 100

Shanghai

SHANGHAI

100

100 100

Binhai New Town

100

Taizhou,HU Zhejiang Jintao

JIANG Zemin Three Represents

100

XI Jinping New Normal

Building a harmonious society

100

CENTRAL LEADERSHIP

Yuhuan New Town

1995 96

Xiamen, Fujian 04 06 07 08 09

100 100

551

100 100

2015 12

2020 17

2025 22

2030 27

FUJIAN 28

2035 32

333.5

2040 37

100

Overseas Chinese Town Shenzhen, Guangdong

SHANDONG

Shenzhen, Guangdong

TIANJIN

Shekou Industrial Zone Shenzhen, Guangdong

Qianhai Modern Service Industry Cooperation Zone Shenzhen, Guangdong

Zhuhai and Hong Kong

230 146

GUANGDONG

100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100

161

GUANGXI

100

JIANGSU

South Sea Pearl Eco-island Haikou Bay, Hainan

100 100 100 100 100 100 100

Phoenix Island Sanya, Hainan

South

100 100

HAINAN SOUTHERN PROVINCE

2005

SHANGHAI

2010

2015

Planned Reclamation Approved Reclamation

2,469 km 42 times

100 100

Shantou, Guangdong

Hong Kong - Zhuhai - Macau Bridge West and East Man-Made Islands

100

Shenzhen Bay Park

RECLAMA APPROVE

100 100

ZHEJIANG

Shuangyu Island 2005 2010

2000

100

506

Pilot Zone for Overseas Chinese Economic and Cultrual Cooperation

PEARL RIVER DELTA

1990

100 100

Dongtan Eco-city

Yuhuan, Zhejiang 1985

100

264.5

PROJECT DURATION

YANGZI RIVER DELTA

Dongtai Tiaozini Reclamation Project

ZHEJIANG FUJIAN

111.5

2020

100 100

2025

2030

REFERENCE Wang, W., L AOcean and (December coaman.201

191

1980 77

1985 82

1990 87

1995 92

2000 97

2005 02

XI Jinping

Building a harmonious society

2010 07

2015 12

CENTRAL LEADERSHIP

New Normal

2020 17

2025 22

2030 27

2035 32

2040 37

163

Development is the absolute principle

1975

HU Jintao

Three Represents

SHANDONG

163

JIANG Zemin

DENG Xiaoping

SHANGHAI

163

JIANGSU

163

TIANJIN

163

FUJIAN

163

ZHEJIANG

HAINAN 1980

1985

1990

1995

2000

2005

2010

2015

2020

2025

2030

2035

2040

1978 Economic Reform and Open Up Policy Planning Period Implementation Period Projected Duration

1992 Privatization of State-Owned Enterprises 2007-08 Financial Crisis

1975

163

MACAU

163

GUANGDONG

192 PROJECT AGENTS Data retrieved mainly from satellite images, planning documents, and media reports compare the projects across a range of aspects, including size, economic value, state of completion, existing and projected population numbers, densities, project timeline, and associated development constituents and agents.

location North

Dongtai Tiaozini Changxing Lingang Caofeidian Industrial Tianjin Eco-city Longkou New Islands Xuwei New Area Taihu New Town Dongtan Eco-city Nanhui/Lingang New Town Tianjin Lianyungang Reclamation ancheng District Dalian Park Tangshan Longkou Bay Wuxi Shanghai Shanghai Jiangsu Jiangsu Liaoning Shandong Shandong Jiangsu

state initiative

provincial initiative

Caofeidian Industrial Tianjin Eco-city Tianjin Park Tangshan Shandong

Dongtai Tiaozini Reclamation Yancheng Jiangsu

city initiative

collaboration with foreign master planner

overseas investment

Nanhui/Lingang New Town Shanghai

Xuwei New Area Lianyungang Jiangsu

Changxing Lingang District Dalian Liaoning

Longkou New Islands Longkou Bay Shandong

Tianjin Eco-city Tianjin

Changxing Lingang Caofeidian Industrial Tianjin Eco-city Longkou New Islands Xuwei New Area District Dalian Tianjin Lianyungang Longkou Bay Park Tangshan Liaoning Jiangsu Shandong Shandong

Binhai New Town Yuhuan N Wenzh Taizhou Zhejia Zhejiang

Dongtan Eco-city Shanghai

Binhai New Town Yuhuan N Wenzh Taizhou Zhejia Zhejiang

Taihu New Town Wuxi Jiangsu

Dongtan Eco-city Nanhui/Lingang Shanghai New Town Shanghai

Taihu New Town Dongtan Eco-city Wuxi Shanghai Jiangsu

Nanhui/Lingang New Town Shanghai

Binhai New Town Yuhuan N Taizhou Wenzh Zhejia Zhejiang

Shenzhen Bay Park Shenzhen Guangdong

Overseas Chinese Town Shenzhen Guangdong

Taihu New Town Wuxi Jiangsu

Shuangyu Island Xiamen Fujian

Overseas Chinese Town Shenzhen Guangdong

Binhai New Town Taizhou Zhejiang

South Sea Pearl Eco-island Haikou Bay Hainan

Phoenix Island Sanya Hainan

reclaimed area

Small

cau Novos ros Urbanos Macau

Longkou New Islands Longkou Bay Shandong

Shuangyu Island Xiamen Fujian

Shenzhen Bay Park Shenzhen Guangdong

Shekou Industrial Zone Shenzhen Guangdong

investment

Low

16 km / ~10 mi

South Sea Pearl Eco-island Haikou Bay Hainan

152

Yuhuan New Town Wenzhou Zhejiang

project inception

Yuhuan New Town Wenzhou Zhejiang

Pilot Zone for Oversease Chinese Shantou Guangdong

Phoenix Island Sanya Hainan

South Sea Pearl Eco-island Haikou Bay Hainan

Recent

New Town Shuangyu Island Pilot Zone for Overseas Chinese Shenzhen Bay Shekou Industrial Qianhai Modern Service Hong Kong - Zhuhai - Macau Bridge Macau Novos South Sea Pearl hou Overseas Chinese Town Shenzhen Park Shenzhen Zone Shenzhen Industry Cooperation West and East Man-Made Islands Aterros Urbanos Xiamen Eco-island Guangdong ang Shantou Zone Shenzhen Macau Guangdong Fujian Haikou Bay Guangdong Zhuhai and Hong Kong Guangdong Guangdong Hainan

Shekou Industrial Zone Shenzhen Guangdong

Overseas Chinese Town Shenzhen Guangdong

Ad molessuntio molupta solore liti am vellace pudaerecta nonsedi andae. Ita quam volorerum a derions editatum n qui il il ipsapid ebitatio. Os nimi, optas i occatur molor accus aliqui di optate co location Phoenix a Island as sincipsam, ut utat Sanya Hainan

provincial initiative

Macau Novos South Sea Pearl Aterros Urbanos Eco-island Macau Haikou Bay Hainan

Shenzhen Bay Park Shenzhen Guangdong

Qianhai Modern Service Industry Cooperation Zone Shenzhen Guangdong

Pilot Zone for Overseas Chinese Overseas Chinese Town Shenzhen Guangdong Shantou Guangdong

Shekou Industrial Qianhai Modern Service Zone Shenzhen Industry Cooperation Zone Shenzhen Guangdong Guangdong

Pilot Zone for Overseas Chinese Town Overseas Chinese Shenzhen Shantou Guangdong Guangdong

Shekou Industrial Qianhai Modern Service Hong Kong - Zhuhai - Macau Bridge Zone Shenzhen Industry Cooperation WestZhuhai and East andMan-Made Hong KongIslands Shenzhen Guangdong Zone Shenzhen Guangdong Zhuhai and Hong Kong Guangdong Guangdong

South

state initialtive

Hong Kong - Zhuhai - Macau Bridge West and East Man-Made Islands Zhuhai and Hong Kong

Pilot Zone for Overseas Chinese Shantou Guangdong

New Town Shuangyu Island hou Xiamen ang Fujian

Manhattan for scale reference

PROJECT AGENTS 152

Tianjin Eco-city Tianjin

152

ngtan Eco-city Shanghai

New Town hou ang

193

152

Shuangyu Island Xiamen Fujian

152

Macau Novos Aterros Urbanos Macau

152

u Bridge Islands ng

Phoenix Island Sanya Hainan

city initiative

collaboration with foreign master planner

overseas investment

200

CAOFEIDIAN Tangshan - Shandong

The world’s largest reclamation project received investments upwards of $100 billion through bank loans, yet today stands as a ghost city far from its 1 million planned population. An analysis of channels blocked through early stages of Caofeidian’s reclamation highlights the decline of flow and velocity of tidal currents and the increase of siltation. This morphological change is also accompanied by heavy metal contamination in Caofedian top soils because of the development’s industrial activity zone. The cost of the reclamation, its maintenance and defense, has not added up to the value of the original proposed master plan, leaving behind acres of empty undevelopable plots New Caofeidian remains a vast, exposed wasteland, where most of the hardware from the reclamation process remains in place. The massive tracts of land labeled numerically and sequentially referred to by their initial engineering coordinates are still awaiting investors.

CAOFEIDIAN INDUSTRIAL ZONE

YEAR 2002*

YEAR 2015

Building Footprint

STATISTIC

5.29 sq km

PROPOSED - **

Blocks Occupied

100.58 sq km

Blocks Vacant

256.58 sq km

Blocks Total

357.16 sq km

431.88 sq km

FOOTPRINT TOTAL = unknown *No occupation data for this year **No consolidated footprint data

68%

2015 Percent of Occupied Blocks

83% Percent of Land Reclamation

DEVELOPER STATISTICS:

2000

2003

2020

planned

construction start

construction complete

310 sq km

¥300 billion

20x

area total

cost

larger than Macau

Iron & Steel Petrochemical Equipment Ports industry

201

2000

2016

proposed

202

2008

2010

2015

203

+ 0.0m

500

1000

+ 0.0m

+ 0.75m

+ 1.5m

2000m

500

1000

+ 0.25m

500

1000

+ 0.75m

+ 1.5m

+ 0.25m

+ 1.0m 2000m

500

1000

+ 1.75m 2000m

+ 1.75m

2000m

500

1000

2000m

500

1000

2000m

500

1000

2000m

+ 0.5m

500

1000

+ 1.0m

+ 0.5m

+ 1.25m 2000m

+ 1.25m

500

1000

+ 2.0m 2000m

+ 2.0m

Flood Risk Map

500

1000

2000m

1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001

Infrastructure 2002 2003

The State Council approved the Plan of Bohai Bay Ports

1994

Caofeidian New District was listed as the most prioritized project in Tangshan

1993

The implementation of Caofeidian project was emphasized in the “Tenth Five-Year Plan” of Hebei Province

Master Planning 1992

Population: 138,343

Key Events

30 leading urban, environmental, and geographic planning and research institutes were involved in over 50 research projects for Caofeidian’s development plan. 14 academicians and over 3500 specialists and scholars were involved in over 100 conferences

204

2004

Reclamation

Construction begins

Plan of Caofeidian New District began

2014

vS 16 key projects were first approved and started in Caofeidian District; There were in total 287 projects established with planned total investment of 367.3 billion yuan

2013

Caofeidian Industrial Zone management office applied to the State Council to set up a free trade zone. It will become a distribution center of import-export commodities for the region around Bohai Bay

Planning completion of major infrastructure

2012

Caofeidian district produced 37.4 trillion yuan; Its growth rate was 9.4% compared with GDP in 2012; The State Council officially approved to establish Caofeidian as the National Economic Development Zone

2011

The State Council renamed the Town of Tanghai the Caofeidian District merging the Town of Binhai and the Town of Luannan into the District; The District includes the Industrial Zone, the Eco-City, and Nanbao Economic Zone; Population: 268,700

2010

The total investment was over 300 trillion yuan

2009

The total expenditure on fixed assets was 71.1 trillion yuan; The yearly revenue was 1.45 trillion yuan; The total investment was over 207.6 trillion yuan

2008

The international forum on Caofeidian’s future was held in Tangshan; The total expenditure on fixed assets was65.06 trillion yuan; The yearly revenue was 1.275 trillion yuan

2007

The master plan of Caofeidian District (2008-2020) was officially approved by the State Council

2006

The planning of Caofeidian eco-city began, led by the ADRI of Tsinghua University and the Sweden firm SWECO; Population: 220,000

2005

President HU Jintao and Prime Minister WEN Jiabao visited Caofeidian respectively; Caofeidian District was included in the national “Eleventh 5-Year Plan”

Approved by NDRC, Shougang Company moved to Caofeidian; Caofeidian Port opened; Caofeidian District was regarded as a pioneering project demonstrating regional circular economy system

205

2015

Planning completion of Phase One (11.95 sq km) Growth became stagnant

Planning the Caofeidian Eco-City Master Plan was approved by the State Council

2016 2017 2018 2019

Ongoing

232

IV. RECLAIMING THE LITTORAL GRADIENT

233

234

Land Reclamation In Island Cities and the Enclosure of Public Space Adam Grydehøj

246

Charlottetown’s Climate Adaptation: Reclaiming Land ‘From’ or ‘For’ Water? Luna Khirfan and Hadi El-Shayeb

258

Global Garden City: Trans-Territorial Ecologies In Singapore Kian Goh

270

Beyond Binaries In Urban Coastal Futures: The Case of Lagos: Nigeria Ben Mendelsohn

286

Boston’s Shifting Ground In A Changing Climate Michael T. Wilson

306

Landscape Resilience: Frameworks For Urbanism On Reclaimed Land Fadi Masoud

234

235

LAND RECLAMATION IN ISLAND CITIES AND THE ENCLOSURE OF PUBLIC SPACE Adam Grydehøj

Theorising between land and sea This chapter considers drivers of island city land reclamation as well as land reclamation’s impact on public space. It represents a reworking of material previously published in Grydehøj.1 Over the past few years, researchers have increasingly drawn attention to the importance of land-sea relationships in social and political processes. Such perspectives have emphasised how these processes are simultaneously fluid and crucial for understanding the human and non-human environment (e.g.2, 3 Peters, 2015).4, 5 In the case of islands and archipelagos, the coproduction of land and sea is enhanced, and the urban/island whole is narrated, negotiated, and experienced on its edges. Such theoretical approaches may be particularly relevant when considering the politics of transformation from water to land. Reclamation, the most commonly used English-language term for the construction of ground where water once had been, is in a sense inappropriate; land reclamation does not typically ‘reclaim’ lost ground at all but instead extends solid ground into new frontiers. Marine spaces often provided the initial rationale for founding human settlements in coastal zones. As a result, terrestrialisation projects – which inevitably alter the nature of adjacent marine spaces, ecosystems, and ‘un-reclaimed’ shorelines as well as drive subsequent adaptation processes – are far from straightforward triumphs of material fixity.

236 Land reclamation in island cities Islands are strongly associated with urbanisation: a mix of territorial, defence, and trade benefits have historically made small islands ideal sites for seats of government, military, or economic power.6 Because many islands have been connected to the mainland through reclamation, we often fail to recognise island cities for what they are.7 Examples of former islands abound, including Dubrovnik, Manila, Mexico City, and Tyre. Yet there are still many major island cities that have expanded significantly through reclamation but around which the waters have not completely receded, such as Abidjan, Amsterdam, Lagos, Mumbai, St Petersburg, Singapore, and Stockholm. The things that people do with coastlines change, and economic circumstances may argue for the creation of new coastlines to serve new uses, for new users. The Copenhagen archipelago presents an instructive case. Copenhagen’s castle island, Slotsholmen, is now nestled in the city centre but was once located considerably offshore. Slotsholmen’s 12th Century re-engineering and

1. Map of Copenhagen, mid-19th Century.

237 fortification were performed in the service of the city’s dominant political force: the island both protected the harbour from incursion and provided a seat from which political power was projected into the city. Changing politics and economies, however, meant that a distant castle island was no longer the ideal seat of power. New phases of urban development privileged the city’s commercial, industrial, and administrative functions. In the 1600s-1700s, reclamation projects saw the city rush out to meet Slotsholmen from the west and encapsulate it in a crescent of artificial islands to the east. Over the centuries, Copenhagen’s growth continued. Capitalist urbanism grants value to empty coastlines; yesterday’s coasts hold less value than tomorrow’s. As a result, new waterfront property is manufactured in front of old waterfront property. Since property values are frequently highest near the city centre, maritime industries are pushed ever farther from the urban core,8 sometimes occasioning successive waves of reclamation and renewal. The seeping away of industry from Copenhagen’s reclaimed Sydhavn district in the 1990s opened the area to residential and business development in the 2000s, resulting in ever-expanding Amsterdam-style archipelagos of artificial islands separated by canals. Once developers have reaped the profits from selling residences with an attractive view, they are incentivised to create even more property, regardless of how this affects users and residents of the existing new coastline. Low-value industrial actors, meanwhile, are kept constantly on the move: In the mid-1990s, industrial redevelopment pushed the old fishing harbour in the inner Nordhavn district out to the extremity of this artificial peninsula. Never-

2. New artificial islands have been created alongside older reclaimed land as Copenhagen’s Sydhavn neighbourhood transforms from an industrial to a residential zone.

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CHARLOTTETOWN’S CLIMATE ADAPTATION: RECLAIMING LAND ‘FROM’ OR ‘FOR’ WATER? Luna Khirfan and Hadi El-Shayeb

In September 2003, Hurricane Juan slammed the Maritime Provinces in Canada’s east (Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia) causing nearly $300 million in infrastructure damages and a loss of eight lives.1 In fact, data over the past 20 years reveal that storm surge events have caused substantial property damage in Canada’s Maritime provinces while also increasing their vulnerability to other climate change impacts such as erosion and subsidence.2, 3 In Charlottetown, the capital of Prince Edward Island, some of the city’s reclaimed land areas are those most impacted by intense weather patterns, exacerbated by climate change. Over decades, the island’s waterfront wharves have been subjected to intense storm surges with destruction of private properties including restaurants and yacht infrastructure,4, 5, 6 while future models based on climate change trends forecast even more flood surges and property loss.7, 8 Although initially land reclamation acquired land from water through draining and levelling for agricultural purposes (e.g., for flood control, drainage, and irrigation), it expanded since the 1940s due to the combination of advances in construction technologies and increase in urbanization demands for housing, industrial, and commercial functions.9 While land reclaimed from coastal bodies is most common in the discourse, we argue that an often-overlooked type is fluvial reclamation –i.e., the reclamation of land from urban streams and rivers by culverting them, and diverting them into underground pipes.10 Akin to coastal land reclamation, fluvial land reclamation facilitates land development over the culverted or channeled urban streams and rivers. This was the case in Brighton, Charlottetown’s western

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GLOBAL GARDEN CITY: TRANSTERRITORIAL ECOLOGIES IN SINGAPORE 1

Kian Goh

1. Gardens by the Bay, Singapore.

How might we envision urban futures that take seriously conditions of globalized urbanization, and, at the same time, offer transformative social and environmental ends? The island-city-state of Singapore is often invoked as such a model for urban planning and economic development. Small in stature, it nevertheless boasts of world-class achievements.2 Singapore appears to have alleviated the predicaments of its rapidly urbanizing neighbors of slums, overcrowding, and poverty. Its concerted planning has completely transformed the island. Four out of five of its residents are housed in state-managed housing. Two-thirds of the island functions as water catchment areas, knit together by an elaborate collection system. And land reclamation has retraced the contours and boundaries of the island, adding a fifth of its area in the last 50 years. Since the publication of its Green Plan in 1992, Singapore has also fashioned itself as a “Model Green City,”3 touting its “high density, high livability” model. Interest in this Singaporean “eco-model” has gained significant traction in the face of mounting global environmental crises. How has the Singaporean state channeled its responses to geographic and political pressures into a model of urban environmental transformation? This essay explores the expansionist outlook shared by Singapore’s economic and environmental strategies through the concept of trans-territorial ecologies – using three examples to illustrate the multiple relationships between ecologies and boundaries.

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BEYOND BINARIES IN URBAN COASTAL FUTURES: THE CASE OF LAGOS, NIGERIA Ben Mendelsohn

1. Makako, Lagos - Nigeria (2011)

In early June 2016, amid heavy and persistent rains, the architect Kunlé Adeyemi’s Makoko Floating School collapsed. Makoko is a sprawling water settlement on the shores of Lagos Lagoon, home to an estimated 100,000 residents who build their houses on stilts or by converting shallow water into land with sawdust, sand, and solid waste.1 Local transportation combines canoes with footbridges and the site is a hub of both intra-African migration as well as the local timber trade. Makoko is centrally positioned on Lagos’s mainland, with its structures and floats of logs starkly visible to motorists who travel along Lagos’s Third Mainland Bridge. The school was a straightforward, three-story A-frame built atop a raft of plastic barrels, deployed against the wishes of local authorities. It provocatively demonstrated to Lagos and the outside world that a porous and soggy urbanism is not only possible here, but that “living with the water” may be the only way to build a thriving and sustainable city. Through a series of academic positions and museum exhibitions in North American and Europe, Adeyemi expanded upon the floating school concept with speculative proposals for a global network of floating cities. His African Water Cities project built on the perceived achievements of the Makoko Floating School, which he described as: “enhancing local infrastructures and promoting responsible, flood resilient strategies while remaining faithful to the neighborhood’s architectural vernacular.” Yet less than two weeks before the school collapsed, Adeyemi was at the Venice Architectural Biennale where he received the Silver Lion for the next phase of his floating A-frame prototype. While Makoko has been affectionately nicknamed “The Venice of Africa,”2 the optics of being in Europe to re-

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BOSTON’S SHIFTING GROUND IN A CHANGING CLIMATE Michael T. Wilson

Strategic Land Formation as Legacy, Threat and Opportunity

1. Boston in 1775, showing the Mill Pond dam, whoch was later filled in to make new land.

Boston, Massachusetts sits at a remarkable intersection of geography and history. As an early site of colonial settlement, it was situated amongst rich coastal marshes and American continent’s only drumlin chain that descended into a sheltered harbor. As an industrializing port city, it engaged in strategic land formation, gaining not only the foundations for new neighborhoods, but also developing the connections that would catalyze additional growth. To support development, logistics, and industry, the city enclosed and filled marshes and mud flats – half of the present downtown area back in colonial times.1 Over the past century, the metro Boston region has built successively more infrastructure to regulate the tides and provide storm protection. Efficiently filled to a historic vertical datum, nearly all of this made land from iconic Back Bay to critical energy and transportation infrastructure around Logan International Airport will be simultaneously subjected to the risk of flooding from projected sea level rise. Hurricane Sandy did not just affect the New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut region. Had it made landfall five hours earlier, Boston and much of the New England coast, too, would have experienced unprecedented flooding.2 This realization, as well as the fact that the Boston had narrowly avoided five similar events in five years, has refocused the city’s design and planning community’s efforts.3 Despite the threat of sea level rise and changing coastal storm dynamics, development in recent years has rushed

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LANDSCAPE RESILIENCE FRAMEWORKS FOR URBANISM ON RECLAIMED LAND Fadi Masoud

1. Don River Park and the Lower Don Lands - Toronto.

Accounts of late nineteenth and early twentieth century comprehensive planning practice led by landscape architects reveal a robust form of physical planning based on a multitude of social, infrastructural, formal, and environmental concerns.1 Faced with the environmental fallouts of rapid urbanization and industrialization, landscape architects proposed multi-scalar designs that were largely based on a region’s environmental functions and processes. This included projects such as Frederick Law Olmsted’s Back Bay Fens and Emerald Necklace in Boston (1878), Charles Eliot’s Metropolitan Park Plan for Boston (1893), the McMillian Plan for Washington D.C. (1902), John Nolen’s Plans for St Petersburg Florida (1922), and the Olmsted Brothers Plan for Los Angeles (1930). Cut and fill operations to shape landform is a central function of landscape design, and in the context of land reclamation can be used to integrate ‘safe to fail’ systematic mechanisms for resilience and adaptation. A landscape designed with the capacity to bounce-back after impacts requires multiple layers of diverse and interconnected strategies, including buffers and failsafe areas.2 This premise is in sharp contrast to the role of the binary of wet / dry often proposed of sites built on reclaimed lands. Single purpose hard infrastructure with solid embankments without the ability to fail safely perpetuate coastal vulnerability and risk.3,4 Urban reclamation projects and retrofits directed by the Office of Fredrick Law Olmsted, and more recently by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA), utilize landforms that are redundant, safe to fail, are multi-purpose, and generate gradients and thresholds of wet to dry.

Terra-Sorta-Firma Reclaiming the Littoral Gradient

Published by Actar Publishers, New York, Barcelona www.actar.com

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Edited by Fadi Masoud

Distribution Actar D, Inc. New York, Barcelona.

Photographs, Images and Drawings All by Fadi Masoud except:

New York 440 Park Avenue South, 17th Floor New York, NY 10016, USA T +1 2129662207 salesnewyork@actar-d.com

by Fadi Masoud with Brent D. Ryan

James Corner, OPSYS + Dave Christensen, p. 8 Adam Gerguson, p. 12 Xiaoxuan Lu, pp. 20-21, 168, 170-171, 205-205 Google Earth, p. 28 Vincent Beiser, pp. 30, 33 Matthew Niederhauser and John Fitzgerald: Future of Suburbia Exhibition – MIT Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism, pp. 210-211 Xi (Colleen) Qiu, pp. 216-217 Wikipedia, pp. 236, 238 Adam Grydehoj, p. 242 Thomas Wright Survey - Sailstrait and David Rumsey Map Collection, p. 249 Luna Khirfan and Hadi El-Shayeb, pp. 251, 252, 255, 256 Kian Goh, pp. 258, 263, 265, 266, 268 Stefan Magdalinski, p. 271 Ben Mendelsohn, p. 273 Iwan Baan, p. 274 Library of Congress, p. 286 Michel T. Wilson, pp. 289, 297 Archives of Frederick Law Olmsted, pp. 307, 308, 315, 317 Michael Van Vulknberg and Associates, p. 317 (Fig11) Waterfront Toronto, pp. 313, 317, 319 Graphic Design Actar Publishers Printing and binding Arlequin

Barcelona Roca i Batlle 2-4 08023 Barcelona, Spain T +34 933 282 183 eurosales@actar-d.com Indexing ISBN: 978-1-948765-38-1 PCN: Library of Congress Control Number: 2019950967 Printed in Europe. All rights reserved © edition: Actar Publishers © texts: The authors © Designs, drawings, and photographs: Their authors

TERRA SORTA FIRMA RECLAIMING THE LITTORAL GRADIENT

FADI MASOUD

TERRA SORTA FIRMA

FADI MASOUD FOREWORD BY

BRENT D. RYAN

Terra-Sorta-Firma

Articles inside

Hammarby Sjöstad

The Battery + Brooklyn Bridge Park

Eko Atlantic City

Songdo

Bayou Vista + Tiki Island

Biscayne Bay Islands +Miami Beach

Forest City

Dubai Waterfront

The Pearl

Lusail

Almere Centrum

The Value Of Sand

Introduction By Fadi Masoud

New Orleans

Acknowledgments

Foreword By Brent D. Ryan

Solidere - Zaitunay Bay