“We dredge because it doesn’t work”: urban political ecology and the uneven geographies of sediment metabolism

ABSTRACT

As shipping companies deploy increasingly larger ships, urban ports around the world must build and maintain new infrastructure to accommodate these vessels. One subaqueous component of these urban infrastructures is the dredged fairways in port and river bottoms through which ships pass. This paper examines the urban political ecological significance of these fairways, framing the movement, governance, and politics of dredging as sediment metabolism. With an emphasis on understanding how the dredging industry produces a range of uneven geographies, the paper situates sediment metabolism in a series of current debates in urban political ecology regarding the metabolic rift, methodological cityism, and anticolonial metabolisms using case studies from multiple sites of dredging activity, especially the North Sea region and Aotearoa/New Zealand.

KEYWORDS:

• Urban political ecology
• urban metabolism
• dredging
• metabolic rift
• sediment

Acknowledgement

Thank you to my interviewees across the field sites in the North Sea region and Aotearoa/New Zealand. Chris Battershill and the rest of the staff at the University of Waikato’s Marine Field Station in Tauranga provided help and support during my stay there. Michael Flitner, Jan Scheve, and all of my artec and INTERCOAST colleagues at Universität Bremen gave invaluable encouragement, advice, and support during this research. Lastly, thank you to Ayona Datta for her patience and editorial advice and to the four anonymous reviewers whose suggestions improved the drafts of this piece immensely.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the INTERCOAST Graduate Research Programme, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [GRK 1598].