Foreword By Brent D. Ryan

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

“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/