Demarcating the granular frontier: planetary urbanization without an inside

ABSTRACT

In its age of global crisis, sand has acquired a conspicuous profile as an urban resource and undercover vector of statecraft. Amidst mounting reports of the disastrous effects of sand mining stoked by intense cycles of urbanization and territorial expansion across the world, it is critical to understand the formation of sand’s granular frontiers, and how their differentiated expression through the global sand crisis demands a reconsideration of the theoretical frontiers of urbanization, territory, and global trade. Building on conceptualisations of sand’s granular geographies and its “geologising” of urban political ecology, this paper seeks to demarcate the theoretical and empirical terrain of sand’s granular frontiers, and how they problematize contemporary debates around urbanization’s “planetary” scope and its extractive underbelly. By reconnecting the frontiers of sand extraction and urbanization, this article theorizes the enclosure of geomorphology and where sand’s satiation of urban and state development is leading. In examining how sand’s simultaneous exclusion from formal processes of valuation and regulation structures urbanization in unpredictable ways, it seeks to provide an account of planetary urbanization without an inside.

KEYWORDS:

• Sand
• urbanization
• resource extraction
• logistics
• sea level rise

The granular frontier

Frontiers are demarcations. They designate limits first and foremost, and imply property, transgression, and exhaustion. They are capitalist-colonial spatializations of the first order, and an indispensable rudiment for capitalism’s instrumentalization of the natural world. As with the duality of concrete labor and abstract labor under capitalism, the dialectic of the abstract and the concrete in capitalism’s production of nature will be theorized in this article through the demarcation of the granular frontiers of sand as a ubiquitous urban resource. The dual characters of value and labor in capitalism begs us to reformulate the frontier along these lines: every frontier is a dual frontier. There is the concrete frontier at which a limit is defined spatially or temporally for the purposes of demarcating the boundaries of the property or constructing a new kind of ecological regime (Blomley, 2016; Moore, 2015). And there is the abstract frontier where new commodity forms and strategies for accumulation are hatched, where innovations are implemented, and standards are set. The abstract and concrete frontiers of ecological regimes need to be conceptualized alongside each other, and as this article will argue, the abstract and concrete modalities of planetary urbanization’s granular frontiers reveal the necessity of capturing this dual movement. Under planetary urbanization, resources flow from the depth of the nonurban to the urban through supply chains and logistics corridors, putting previously remote zones into relation with urbanization. Sand is an urban resource that is a critical ingredient of concrete, as well as an expedient fill material for infill and land reclamation projects, dredged along the bends and tributaries of river systems, estuaries, among archipelagos and even in the open sea itself, as well as mined in sufficiently sandy soils and alluvial deposits. The concept of planetary urbanization was built upon Lefebvre’s theoretical insights into urbanization’s relation to capital and the state as a dialectical “implosion-explosion”, where the historical geography of capitalist urbanization gradually enrols non-city spaces through expanding trade and logistical networks as city agglomerations become greater conductors of capital through the 20th and twenty-first century (Brenner, 2014; Brenner & Schmid, 2015; Lefebvre, 2009). Thus, planetary urbanization seeks to characterize the urban as a process intertwined with the accumulation of capital on a planetary scale. The relationship between planetary urbanization and totality has drawn criticism from queer and postcolonial geographies, which dispute the analytic as a totality that recognizes no outside. Without knowing an outside, it intentionally or unintentionally does epistemic violence to those outsides (Jazeel, 2018; Oswin, 2018). The question of totality is an important one if we are to understand how frontiers are made and unmade under planetary urbanization, as frontiers designate what is internal and what is external to a system. Without having a clear conceptualization of its frontiers, and why their demarcations are necessary for the ongoing reproduction of urbanization at varying scales, those “outsides” of planetary urbanization then become murky, rendering its totality incoherent. Sand is one such “outside” of planetary urbanization that has thus far remained understudied, and so presents an opportunity to conceptualize the frontiers of planetary urbanization, and how it structures urban, territorial, and logistical processes through its “outsides.” Urbanization without an inside, then, shifts our focus towards those subjects and processes whose exclusion from valuation structures urbanization, whether on the other side of a frontier, hidden in the shadow of social reproduction, or amongst those myriad urban ensembles that are designated “informal.” By thinking urbanization without an inside through its granular frontiers, we can trace the geosocial formations emerging from these planetary flows of sediment.

Planetary urbanization’s conceptualization of the planetary as a totality has occasionally proven difficult to parse at the level of theory: on the one hand planetary urbanization as a totalizing framework, from the point of view of its critics, denigrates those views from the outside, as they are seen to be secondary to its concerns, and somehow provincial compared to the metropolitan matters at hand (Angelo & Goh, 2021; Oswin, 2018; Wilson & Jonas, 2018); on the other hand, its conceptualization of urbanization presents it as a dynamic totality of processes that not only exceed fixed boundaries, but reveals what is normally sequestered in urban theory that shies away from the “hidden abodes” of urbanization by staying within city limits. With its ostensible Marxist inheritance from Lefebvre, the totality of planetary urbanization is not a totalizing theory, but a critical intervention in analyzing what otherwise presents itself as a limited form of geographic and economic development (Goonewardena, 2018). To present a theory of totality without “totalizing” theory entails placing those “outsides” that are engendered through the demarcation of frontiers critical for the subsistence of the totality, and demonstrating how humans and non-humans are rendered “outsides” of urbanization for the purposes of maintaining the coherence and value-proposition of its reproduction.

For Blomley and his interlocutors in legal theory, a frontier is a distinction constitutive of law, a scission whereby the violence required for the legitimation of law is distinguished from “the disorder [that] must exist outside of law” (Blomley, 2003, p. 124). Urban frontiers, then, can tell us two things: how urbanization confronts an “outside” to reproduce itself; and what novel urban configurations are taking place amidst foundering cycles of accumulation and circulation to introduce a new order which will be both resilient and profitable. Contemporary assertions of the global sand crisis discursively frame the increasingly prominent discrepancies and excesses of sand’s commodity chain in terms of poor data, poor governance, and illicit tendencies (Bendixen et al., 2019); attending to sand’s granular materiality indicates that these burgeoning crises are moments of friction between the abstract construction of sand as a low-value high-volume resource, and the geomorphologies and ecologies that sediment forms a part of (Jamieson, 2021).

Illicit sand markets have emerged all over the globe. India’s sand markets are dominated by powerful and aggressive sand mafias, while less notable criminal and political elements are prevalent across national and regional sand markets (Beiser, 2018; Bisht, 2021; Harris, 2019; Salle, 2022). Across Southeast Asia, burgeoning domestic sand markets have also been notably inflected by Singapore’s outsized demand, which this paper will partly focus on, as it has expanded its own borders through land reclamation, territory which it has built into the sea, partly using hundreds of millions of tonnes of imported sand, to masterplan its rise as a global city through bespoke parcels of land for logistical, maritime, financial, and petrochemical operations. Cambodia, notable for its export of sand to Singapore between 2008 and 2016, has seen a boom in its domestic sand market as urban property markets have heated up amidst foreign domestic investment and infrastructure development, resulting in rampant extraction to resource increasingly speculative projects (Haffner, 2020). Dam construction and urbanization along the Mekong are constraining sediment transport to such a degree that the Mekong Delta is subsiding faster than sea levels are rising (Vasilopoulos et al., 2021). These are brief sketches I will touch upon, highlighting the work of other researchers, to identify the heterogenous yet identifiable articulations of the granular frontier, and the ways in which they “geologize” planetary urbanization (Dawson, 2021).

In their effort to geologize the social, Clark, Yusoff, and others, attempt to make “the Anthropocene thesis … matter to social thought” (Clark & Yusoff, 2017, p. 9). The primary means of this mattering is through the delineation of geology’s stratification of the social through its demarcation between life and nonlife, valuable and worthless, and how this stratification shapes racial and political-economic orders (Yusoff, 2018). For Povinelli, late liberalism’s demarcation between life and non-life, and its designation of geological subjects, are an instantiation of “geontopower” critical for biopolitics; what is lively and what is merely inert, what is productive and what is merely waste, what is worthy of conservation and what is simple externality are all geontological questions, ultimately (Povinelli, 2016). A recurring insight is that merely endorsing the vitality of the inorganic is an insufficient way of resisting geontopower: “everything is vital from the point of view of capitalization” (Povinelli, 2016, p. 38). At the same time as geontopower maintains the distinction between bios and geos, the production of sand as cheap nature then intertwines bios and geos in disastrous ways, as ecologies and livelihoods crumble under sand mining. The geosocial formations of the granular frontier explicitly position the metabolic voracity of urbanization not only in terms of materiality, but in terms of states of matter themselves, as the expansion of cities intensifies the turbulence of rivers, excavates arable land, and erases shoals and islands.

To that end, this paper offers a conceptualization of planetary urbanization’s granular frontiers, and how they invite us to consider urbanization without an “inside;” that is, urbanization’s predication, and at times outright predation, on processes beyond its frontiers, and whose formal incorporation would render its current mode untenable. It will begin with the granular frontier of urban livelihoods across the global south, which shifts uncertainly for urban and rural communities alike; secondly, the geosocial frontiers of urban resilience and sea level rise; and finally, the granular frontiers of global trade, where sand is enrolled in the dredging of ports to intensify logistical operations. The very same urban resilience underwritten by granular frontiers of some urban models discussed are also logistical hubs carving out granular frontiers for the expansion of global trade. Singapore is the principal exemplar of this trend but represents only one of a variety of port projects. Singapore’s land reclamation project, responsible for its status as an exceptional importer of sand, is driven in part by its logistical and maritime ambitions alongside its nation-building, becoming a paradigm of its urban development for the past six decades (Hassler & Topalović, 2014). Methodologically, this article stitches together a patchwork of existing scholarship on sand and urbanization, with my theorization of the granular frontier developed through the emergent points of contact between these analyzes. The hope is that this article provides the connective tissue across these diverging expressions of the granular frontier, and what they tell us about sand’s role in urbanization.

Together, by demarcating the granular frontiers of planetary urbanization we can attend to the ways in which sand’s granular materiality is constructed and translated from concrete to abstract frontiers. The concrete frontier finds its expression in extraction, where geomorphology and ecology are the substrate for the production of sand as a granular resource. The “abstract” granular frontier concerns how these urban and territorial processes undergird specific regimes of accumulation that plug into the world market through various sectors – be they infrastructural, urban, logistical, to name a few that this article will touch upon. These sectors of accumulation and circulation are not merely “abstract,” as they each are grounded through a set of concrete practices that are reproduced through agents and institutions, but they are “abstract” in relation to value. Sediment and its geomorphologies form “concrete” situation that is then translated to the “abstract” materiality of sand which underwrites forms of production and circulation. While in a previous paper, features of granular systems were extrapolated into a systematic metaphor for sand’s production as a resource (Jamieson, 2021), this paper locates the significance of sand’s granular materiality in its ability to transition between, and shape, different states of matter, and different matters of urbanization, territory, and logistics. Sand is counterposed with the granular because if sand is the haphazardly constructed resource extracted from geomorphological multiplicity, then its granular relationality is what becomes focalized through this extraction. For granular systems, friction is the dominant factor in determining transitions between phases (Guyon et al., 2020). Friction then can become another way of approaching the eco-Marxist concept of metabolic rift – that is, capital’s disruption of socioecological metabolism (Foster, 2016; Foster & Burkett, 2016; Saito, 2017, 2020). Friction can situate the capital ecological regime of sand through its transformations at sites of extraction and production, both in a geophysical sense (riverbanks collapsing, tides advancing, land reclaimed and concrete setting) and value-theoretical sense (constant capital’s incorporation into fixed capital, cycles of accumulation being set into motion through enhanced logistical capacity, crises of production). Through focalizing moments of friction and transition, the interplay of the geomorphological, socioecological, and the value-theoretical in sand’s construction as an urban resource can be better articulated, making visible the geosocial trajectory of planetary urbanization.

Urban livelihoods at the granular frontier

Sand lines the cracks of planetary urbanization. Mounds and stockpiles of it lie in wait throughout peri-urban interstices, sprawling hinterlands, and infrastructural corridors. It is in the rapidly expanding cities of the global south that sand first became conspicuous as a resource, livelihoods becoming implicated in granular frontiers as they shifted, gathered, and fragmented. In fluvial, coastal, and inland settings, sand mining crumbles the city’s edge into a series of operations extracting, transporting, stockpiling, and consuming sand in varied productions. But before sand assumes an urban trajectory, it is part of a geomorphological ensemble of sediment and flow. Through its extraction, those livelihoods previously thought beyond the urban become ensnared in the frontiers of a quintessential urban material. This ongoing and processual movement of material chimes with many of planetary urbanization’s emphasis on urban processes over and above urban objects (Brenner & Schmid, 2015). However, in resolutely identifying an urban aperture through which to view socio-spatial ensembles, critics of the concept have noted its uncritical conception of totality in prioritizing epistemology over social ontology, according to Ruddick et al, diminishing the role of friction and contestation in urban formations, leaving vacant understandings of “everyday practice and transformations of its practitioners in relation to the formation and deformation of the urban, as well as its possible outsides” (Ruddick et al., 2018, p. 388). Though urbanization must be understood as a process with planetary implications that exceeds the discrete demarcations of town and country, it is the consideration of the outside which remains vital for theorizing urbanization in capitalism and its planetary scope. “Outside” is not simply social, spatial, or temporal remove but a critical aspect of a frontier’s demarcation, and for capital, its “outsides” are those unwaged and unvalued processes which enable profitable production and circulation. Frontiers are not static forms, but relational sites which shift according to social, political, economic, and legal architectures which, however driven by hegemonic profit-seeking logics, touch the ground in unpredictable ways, and demonstrate the formation and deformation of the urban in terms of everyday practice. Sand seeps into the lives of urban majorities across the globe, lining the peripheries and cracks of city-making.

The intense pace of urbanization of Phnom Penh in recent years has seen an explosion in sand demand (John, 2021), where sand for construction and for infill to construct land as speculative real estate projects is dredged up and down the Mekong River, with the latter exacerbating fluvial dynamics already straining under sand mining (Flynn & Srey, 2022; Haffner, 2020). Construction sand is shifted off barges in impromptu stockpiles and then taken by dump trucks to feed a newly announced development, mixed into concrete that is then poured to fill newly dug foundation pits (Reynolds et al., 2023). As sediment is removed, fluvial flows accelerate, precipitating erosion and riverbank collapse (Sullivan, 2020), with dredging in the downstream Mekong twice exceeding replacement rates, owing to upstream hydropower development constraining sediment flow (Hackney et al., 2020). Sand dredging is also accelerating saltwater intrusion, further stressing agriculture and aquaculture (Eslami et al., 2021). Rural communities and fisheries have borne the brunt of sand mining in Cambodia, with agrarian communities on the outskirts of Phnom Penh beset by the feverish dredging that is fueling both the city’s urban rise and its expansion and filling of wetlands. Sand mining precipitated the riverbank collapse in Roka Koang, 45 kilometers up the Mekong River from Phnom Penh. The dredging, having degraded the fishing stock the community relied upon, driving some households to catch snails, also destroyed houses that were meant to be repaired through community funds sustained by royalties from sand mining, though payments have been irregular (Flynn & Srey, 2022); some households have become small-scale sand miners as other livelihood sources are destroyed by dredging (Flynn & Srey, 2022). Like with many other natural resource industries in Cambodia, granular frontiers are controlled by powerful, politically connected companies who charge rents to dredging companies that access the sand mining concessions, often in blatant contravention of the government’s own regulations around natural resources and ecological protections (Global Witness, 2010). Environmental Impact Assessments are missing, or fabricated, and catastrophic effects of over-dredging, including riverbank collapse, go uncompensated, with irregular payments expected to cover the loss of homes and livelihoods (Flynn & Srey, 2022). However, the granular frontier is not always a matter of slow violence and livelihood collapse, though geomorphological and ecological disturbance remain recurrent features of the granular frontier. On the west coast of Africa, we see livelihoods anxiously traced in sand.

At Accra’s urban edge, around six million tonnes of sand are mined per year to resource the expansion and intensification of the city from open pit mines (Dawson, 2021). In comparison with marine and fluvial sand mining, which will form the focus of the rest of the paper, land-based sand mining presents a granular frontier whose imbrication with livelihoods presents an ambiguous relation, providing both a source of livelihoods and an abrasion of livelihoods. In Dawson’s account of “geological urban political ecology” in Accra, the sand of urbanizing Accra tells a story of mobility, anxiety, and improvisation. Sand is mined both for larger real estate projects of the city’s bustling upscale expansion, as well as for concrete homes. Sites of mining, known as “sand winning”, shift as quarries are depleted, or sources otherwise proving unpromising, with mining shifting around the periphery of the city. Contractors identify sandpits where it is mined and then transported to construction sites, concrete manufacturers, and selling points, often at the expense of agrarian smallholders, already under pressure from residential development in the outskirts of Accra (Dawson, 2021). Contractors are licensed to mine “sand winning” sites, bulldozing the surface layers of earth to expose high-quality sand beneath. Landowners seeking to turn once-agricultural land into more lucrative residential projects often lease the land to sand miners before then going on to develop it. Once mined and moved from ground to truck, “tippers” proceed to sell it to consumers. Illegal sand mining forms a large part of Accra’s granular economy, with the illegal “tippers” and “winners” being young unemployed men who otherwise cannot find stable paying work. As Dawson notes, these dynamics are driven by Greater Accra’s larger privatized land system, with sand emerging in the cracks between existing agricultural tenures and their gradual dismantling, first crumbled into so many tonnes to be transported by trucks to other construction sites, and then into residential development.

As granular frontiers reconfigure livelihoods at the urban fringe, the mounting scale of both extraction and burgeoning construction projects in previously suboptimal city hinterlands abrade the ecological conditions for social reproduction. As Bisht notes, the emergence of small-scale sand mining is prevalent in contexts of “deagrarianization,” which is both the “result and further reinforcement of the dissolution of traditional livelihoods … following tendencies of extractivism towards the creation of monoproductive local economic systems” (Bisht, 2021, p. 6). By repurposing Simone’s conceptualization of the surrounds of planetary urbanization as its ubiquitous infrastructure and interstitial social ensemble (Simone, 2022), we can elucidate how the livelihoods pieced together and fragmented apart by sand mining are varied and multifarious, ranging from artisanal small-scale extraction of sand, and the ad hoc logistics networks that typify the sand market of Accra, Ghana, to the elite-captured sand market of Cambodia, and the intense dredging along the Mekong, which disproportionately affects riverside communities, farmers, fishers, and the ecologies they depend on (Marschke et al., 2021).

These multiplying externalities are rarely reflected in the price of sand itself, as it is uniformly cheap and accessible across these contexts. This cheapness is rarely innate to these markets, as the granular frontier is often under the control of politically connected elites, as is the case in Cambodia and India, where illicit sand markets have flourished (Rege, 2015). Lamb et al. found that for both Cambodia and Myanmar, the price of exported sand varied between USD$20 and $5 a tonne (2019), while Cambodian Ministry of Commerce data for sand prices in Phnom Penh between 2022 and 2023 shows fluctuations between USD $18 and $14 a tonne (CEIC, 2023). Sand extractivism becomes an important vector of domestic political and economic control compared to other mineral extraction, as it is not valuable enough to be pursued by multinational mining companies, but often becomes concentrated in the hands of powerful local or regional actors who can monopolize the extraction, controlling the flow and price of sand to their benefit (Bisht, 2021). Social reproduction becomes reconstituted by the friction between sand’s construction as a cheap and limitless resource and the geomorphological and ecological constraints of sediment, foreclosing the conditions of their livelihood, and forcing them to adopt “self-depleting extractive activities” (Bisht, 2021, p. 7), and in some cases small-scale sand mining. The ways in which certain places are “disarticulated” from planetary urbanization in order to consolidate the urban and give it its “planetary” coherence must be attended to, and considering the granular frontier in relation to its surrounds, how it fragments, immerses, and crumbles urban and non-urban livelihoods alike becomes one way of doing so. The socioecological milieus sand is extracted from form an outside, intercalated yet isolated from the urbanization that depends upon it, but also becoming the forensic evidence of this interconnection. Situating livelihoods amidst granular frontiers can help think through the socio-ecological “outsides” of planetary urbanization, and how they undergird some of its spatial forms, recognizing “the ongoing production and reproduction of unevenness and difference” absent in the abstraction of the “planetary” (Loftus, 2018, p. 88), while still centring the entanglement of the earth system with urbanization that the planetary nonetheless invokes.

The Anthropocene sediments of rising tides

If sediment is the meeting ground of the geological and the elemental (Bremner, 2021), then interrogating the granular frontiers of land reclamation invites us to center the “planetary” nature of urbanization. This section focuses on the granular frontiers of Singapore’s land reclamation project, an extensive series of territorial prostheses that have been built on sand imported from all over Southeast Asia. Since its colonization by the British East India Company in 1819, Singapore has been a thriving port city plugged into the world market. Even before that, archaeological evidence heavily implies that the island formed a key trading post of the Srivijaya and Majapahit empires (Miksic, 2013). 1822 is the first recorded act of land reclamation in Singapore, with Boat Quay, where under Stamford Raffles’ orders, 300 Chinese and Indian laborers were paid pittances to level a hill to fill in a swamp on the south bank of the Singapore River, making it suitable for shipping activities (Abdul Kadir, 1955). Reclamation proceeded erratically under colonial rule, as in Hong Kong (Brigstocke, 2021), but became a core part of its urban development after the city–state achieved self-governance in 1959, and rapidly accelerated in scope and scale after the amendment of the Foreshores Act in 1966 (Fok, 2021). This was in the context of profound geopolitical and economic vulnerability, as in the year prior Singapore was ejected from the merger with Malaysia. The lack of natural resources, water, and space, seemingly conspired to drive the fledgling nation into a breakneck modernization and nation-building program, with multiple ambitious housing, infrastructure, and industrial projects conducted throughout the sixties and 70s (Latif, 2009). All of these were inflected by land reclamation in some way, from the industrial zone of Jurong in the west, to the ambitious East Coast Reclamation scheme, to the numerous islands whose indigenous communities were displaced (Connolly & Muzaini, 2022), and the eventual reclamation of Marina Bay, now host to Singapore’s most recognizable landmarks, the sinisterly named Marina Bay Sands and the Gardens by the Bay, the cosmetic linchpins of its global city aspirations (Bullock, 2014).

While initial reclamation projects relied on soil and clay excavated from hills, reclamation projects since the late 1980s began incorporating massive amounts of imported sand, with imports from both Malaysia and Indonesia between 1990 and 2000 totalling over 500,000,000 tonnes (UNCOMTRADE, 2023). Their reliance on imported sand, as well as the extensive nature of their reclamation projects, have caused regional consternation long before the global sand crisis became a story, invoking sand bans from Malaysia in 1997 and 2003, and Indonesia in 2007 (Milton, 2010). What is notable about the transition from the endogenous markets for fill material that resourced Singapore’s geographic expansion until they began importing sand over the past three decades is that the city-state’s urban strategy of territory became unmoored by internal metabolic parameters, and instead focalized around the geosocial construction of sand as a commodity. With millions of tonnes of sand imported from Malaysia and Indonesia, its closest neighbors, the city–state could underwrite its developmental strategy with sand, a resource it could accumulate with superior economic power. Sand’s integral status as a national resource is no more evident than in the massive sand stockpiles maintained by the Housing Development Board, safeguarding crucial construction sand in the event of future sand bans, or the occasional kilometre-long, multi-tiered dune of reclamation sand procured in advance of successive phases of reclamation projects, such as the Tuas Megaport. It is important to differentiate between different kinds of sand, as its status as a resource is by no means monolithic. Construction sand requires more stringent testing for impurities and specific grain profile, while reclamation sand is of relatively lower quality than construction sand.

In sand’s turbulent flow, riven with friction which renders the boundaries between states of matter unstable, capital’s value-form finds its eerie mimic. A materiality of atomized equivalents, similarly sized grains repeated over and over so that they achieve collective, if frictional, motion, transitioning between flux and fixity, requiring constant input to keep up the fiction of self-valorising motion. This is only similarity, but it is not incidental – in sand’s construction as a resource we have something resembling a form of abstract space that finds its expression in the extraction of sand which is a cheap and plentiful input that provides the bulk for a variety of urban and territorial projects. Granular materials are expedient for both transportation as well as storage, piling, consolidation, and ground improvement. And in sufficient quantities, the effects of sand’s construction as a resource, focalising the granular materiality of sediment effects catastrophic shifts which unravel geomorphological and socio-ecological formations. For Lamb et al., Singapore’s market-distorting demand has had similar impacts on riverside cultivators in Myanmar and coastal fishing communities in Cambodia, resulting in lost livelihoods for communities as the ecologies they cultivated and relied on were degraded by sand mining. As opposed to the dispossessive directness of land grabs, which are similar in outcome, the damage incurred by these massive dredging operations permeated as a “sleight of hand … the land resource may be degraded, but it is not obviously being grabbed; it may be common property, but it is not being enclosed; and it may be used by local people, but usually not directly” (Lamb et al., 2019, p. 11). This sleight of hand becomes a sleight of land. The lack of comprehensive studies of these sites of extraction contributes towards the dismissal of externalities caused by mining by regional and state governments (Koehnken et al., 2020), which is not to understate the larger role played by governmental complicity in securing these flows of sand, as in the Cambodian context, where dredging companies are often in part or outright by politically connected elites and dynasties (Flynn & Srey, 2022; Global Witness, 2010). The turbidity and turbulence at the extractive frontier manifest sand as an ideal and obedient material stockpiled into contoured abundance, ready to form the foundation of urban and territorial projects, emerging at the other end of its opaque supply chain as geomorphology’s commodity form.

As Bridge noted, the politics of volume must extend to the circulation of commodities and “the techno-political practices through which these flows are secured” (Bridge, 2013, p. 57), which in this case are inextricable from the opaque, fragmented, and illicit tendencies of the transnational sand trade. Singapore’s project and projection of sovereignty is reliant upon sand’s abstract social nature (Moore, 2018); thus, it becomes indirectly dependent on milieus of socioecological multiplicity that are mediated by sediment. Sand is critical for the city–state for accumulating surplus territory, through which it secures its political-economic trajectory through enhanced logistical capacity and long-term urban planning, providing a release valve for cycles of redevelopment (with the state as the largest owner and developer of land) (Haila, 2015). And as regional transnational sand markets have been made insecure and unpredictable, the singular potency of sand as commodity-territory has lingered in the city-state’s conception of space, even if it is now problematic to procure. Multiple strategies of geographic expansion and land reclamation which do not rely on imported sand have proliferated since the controversies of Cambodian sand. Underground space is being primed for more expansive development (Zhou & Zhao, 2016), while research is being conducted into recycling waste by processing incineration bottom ash into a granular form called NEWSand, though it is only in the experimental stages of development (Goh, 2019). But even as sand imports drip off the official ledgers of UNCOMTRADE, it becomes an even more critical resource as it guarantees the efficacy of reclamation projects that are steadily becoming more expensive, risky, and expertise-intensive. The growing scarcity of sand prompted the city–state to recycle excavated soil from construction projects and dredged marine clay as greater proportions of fill material. More must be done to ensure that these slurry materials refrain from compromising the ground of these projects, as these soils and clays, under sufficient load, threaten to liquefy. Sand becomes the geophysical margin of error for the minimum territorial integrity of this new land.

In 2019 Prime Minister announced that land reclamation will continue until 2100 to mitigate sea level rise, with a nominal amount of $1 billion SGD to be spent by the government per year until 2100 to construct and enact these mitigations (Lee, 2019). It appears that the extraction of territory will quietly persist into the future under the guise of moral necessity and mortal survival, as with other small island states that have the resources to ensure their future, with sand forming the foundation of “hard” mitigation measures which are the most widespread and tested (Wong, 2018). Thus, the future resilience of Singapore’s urban model will be underwritten by this margin of imported sand that will require the demarcation of granular frontiers elsewhere; gluts of dirt-cheap sand might be a thing of the past, but the city-state’s economic power and healthy national reserves will be able to afford this expense. The granular frontiers of sea level rise will ensure that urban resilience becomes a zero-sum game, with ecologically unequal exchange underlying the bold and Promethean plans that Singapore and other coastal cities are drawing up, driving tides back through the accumulation of surplus territory. Malaysia has been quietly selling sand to Singapore since 2018, and Indonesia recently announced that it will export sea sand once again.

Sand lines the cracks of a novel urban configuration and its future transmutation under scripts of urban resilience and ingenuity, but unearthing the granular geography of this configuration entails tracing longer histories, calling attention to the muddy remainders and absences churned up by this process, and to the relations shaped by the restless motion of errant grains. Singapore is but one exemplar. In Southeast Asia alone, multiple urban megaprojects are underwritten by land reclamation: the Great Garuda in Indonesia, Manila Bay in the Philippines (Hornidge et al., 2020), and the Penang South Islands and Forest City in Malaysia, while further afield reclamation projects from Eko Atlantic in Nigeria, to Songdo in South Korea, to Lantau Tomorrow in Hong Kong, to varying degrees position resilience as a property to be secured through territorial expansion, which in turn expands the possibilities of private property and the projection of economic power within these cities. The aspirational thrust of these projects, and the contentious relationship they often have with local communities and environmental groups, delineate urban visions of resilience which are bound up with the reproduction of private property at larger and more intense spatial scales. Part of the attractiveness of reclamation as a form of development is this godlike act of creation, the production of tabula rasa in place of overtly dispossessive strategies of urban accumulation, when in truth the externalities themselves are displaced through sand’s commodity chain, and the manifold difficulties of properly regulating sand markets. These practices of reclamation point towards the ideological recalibration of urbanization in the Anthropocene, with resilience functioning as both a moral imperative and discursive camouflage. This recalibration, as Wakefield notes, problematizes theories of planetary urbanization which, even if they insist on the heterogeneous and fragmented interanimation of urban and nonurban, present the extension and intensification of urbanization as a given, without leaving space for the “end” of the urban as a new spatial and economic form that the urban could give rise to, such as through the urbicidal visions of climate-doomed Miami reborn as the Islands of South Florida (Wakefield, 2022). While Miami is a particular case, like Singapore, both challenge conceptualisations of planetary urbanization in the Anthropocene; the former as a city crushed into infill for the construction of autarkic islands heralding the “end” of the urban; the latter as a series of logistically integrated islands bulwarked by sedimentary arbitrage, representing a carnivorous urban metabolism that deterritorializes the relationship between territory and sovereignty. By gathering the sediments of the Anthropocene, we can delineate the geosocial dimensions of normative claims around global sand scarcity to reveal longer histories of urban, territorial, and logistical plots which have all been built on the plasticity of space sand grants as a resource, the latter of which we will turn to now.

The granular frontiers of the global trade

Following on from the previous discussion of Anthropocene sediments, where granular frontiers represent the survival of urban models at the cost of communities and ecologies beyond their borders, this section culminates in the granular frontiers of global trade, whereby the reproduction and intensification of global trade become demarcated by granular frontiers in the construction of ports. Research by Sengupta and Lazarus has shown that 65 of the top 100 seaports by throughput have expanded seaward by a collective 978km² between 1990 and 2020 (Sengupta & Lazarus, 2023), a trend they anticipate will also collide with coastal adaptation strategies that will see many existing ports needing to become “resilient” against sea level rise (Sengupta & Lazarus, 2023). The granular frontiers of global trade demarcate the logistical practices and political-economic formations shaped by sand, and what kind of geosocial subjects the global economy produces through these frontiers.

Contemporary theories of logistics have noted the development of logistical practices as a paradigmatic shift in the capitalist mode of production, achieving the globalization of supply chains and arbitrage of labor on an unprecedented scale (Chua et al., 2018; Cowen, 2014; Danyluk, 2018; Smith, 2016). Chief among these developments was the development of containerization in the wake of the Second World War, as a corollary to the internationalization of finance and debt that propagated through infrastructure and standardization (Easterling, 2014). Eager to retain its status as a port city, independent Singapore diligently developed its ports and outlying islands into logistical and petrochemical infrastructure, gifting Shell Oil the entire island of Bukom to refine and store oil (Connolly & Muzaini, 2022). Ports and logistics cities across the world are being built in anticipation of the increasing volumes of global trade, with ultradeep births required for the next generation of container ships and supertankers, requiring port dredging operations which are more technically demanding, at greater spatial scales, and at greater depths, the latter two of which intensify the amount of infill required to build this bespoke logistical territory. While these projects have countless other components, variables, and factors, each with its own supply chains, technical requirements, and labor relations, the reclamation depends on critical volumes of granular infill to provide the foundation of these projects. And while not all port construction is indicative of sand’s dysfunctional construction as a resource, with regulations around sand mining varying from state to state and region to region, the competition that drives global trade, and the accompanying homogenization of technical standards, places a downward pressure on sand markets already made febrile by the demands of urbanization, as indicated by the growing spatial footprints of seaports globally.

As Cowen notes, logistics is not merely a suite of techniques or standards which facilitates the circulation of commodities, but the impetus behind a reconfiguration of governance and political subjectivity (Cowen, 2014). Migrant labor fuels “logistics cities” and hubs across the world, with Cowen noting Dubai in particular as forming a “model” for labor relations in their very “emaciation of political rights in the face of trade flows” (Cowen: 123) through the overwhelming reliance on migrant laborers on temporary work permits, without any formal rights to strike or undertake other forms of labor action. Singapore, as in Dubai and port cities across the world, rely on uneven flows of labor and territory to perpetuate an allegedly “frictionless” circulation of commodities. Not only do these labor regimes leave workers with no path towards conventional citizenship nor any means of resisting their worsening working conditions, but they are also kept at arm’s length from the state, cloistered in whorls of contracting and subcontracting, logistical involutions of their own kind, which entail that any harm they face and any possible restitution is mired in labyrinthine networks between construction companies, regulatory agencies, labor agents, and dormitories (Chua, 2018; Jamieson, 2022). This situation, albeit a more far-reaching moral and political disaster, is analogous to the circuitous supply chain of sand involved in these port reclamations; the granular frontier is displaced through numerous intermediaries, all bound by non-disclosure agreement, so that malfeasance can be confined to an errant segment of the supply chain, while the design of that supply chain incentivizes a volume of sand to procured at a price acceptable to the end-user, which is ultimately the nation-state. The desire to conceal both migrant workers and imported sand from regulatory scrutiny speaks to the geosocial subjects created through logistical necessity: the worker without rights and the territory without origin. They are subjects of and subjected to logistical necessity as they are shorn of their political dimensions and agency to organize, in the case of migrant workers, or be contested, in the case of imported sand. Migrant worker dormitories abut reclamation projects and the dunes that nourish them in the industrial and logistical zone of Tuas, the site of the future Tuas Megaport.

First announced in 2012, the Tuas Megaport, along with Changi Terminal Five, represents the next phase of Singapore’s logistical ambitions. Once the Tuas Megaport is completed, after 2040, it will be able to handle up to 65 million TEUs, exceeding all five past and current facilities put together. Upon completion, the Megaport will occupy some 1,337 hectares, co-located with other key manufacturing and logistical operations in Singapore’s industrial hubs of Jurong and Tuas, abounding with opportune “synergies” (MPA, 2023). While the dredging of the port is still ongoing, Phase One has been completed, with the berths already operational. Labeled the “port of the future” AI-driven digital technologies will provide “real-time” information on shipping traffic, as well as decrease turnaround time and wring other efficiencies from port operations (MPA, 2023). The Maritime and Ports Authority also tout the possibilities of automating the yard cranes and the vehicles which transport containers.

Sand is the guarantor of this geographic engorgement and subsequent logistical evolution, with the spaces built to anticipate massive increases in the volume of containers founded on its dysfunctional construction as a resource. The Tuas Megaport will serve to consolidate all of Singapore’s disparate port infrastructure and integrate it into the industrial and logistical zone of Tuas, freeing up more centrally located former port infrastructure for redevelopment. As ports upgrade for the next wave of logistical fixes, from automation and enhanced capacities to the post-carbon transition and the “greening” of supply chains (Poulsen et al., 2018), these port reclamations form anticipatory geographies that will embed not only technological capabilities that these fixes entail but pioneer the social and political relations required to enact them. The granular frontier here forms a covert logistical seam of the world market, maximizing the surface area accumulation requires to proceed at greater volumes and spatial scales, as well as the social and political relations required to facilitate these operations. The origin of the sand that the Megaport is, and will be, built upon can only be guessed at from the diet of Singapore’s sand imports throughout the duration of the dredging: Cambodia, Vietnam, Myanmar, Malaysia, and the Philippines have all exported considerable amounts of sand to Singapore throughout this time; while sand import statistics are reported “in aggregate” by the city–state, the granular compositions of each reclamation, and precise origins of extraction, are sealed by the non-disclosure agreements the subcontractors licensed by the Building and Construction Authority must abide by.

Campling and Colás, in their theorization of capitalism’s relation to the sea, note the terraqueous modalities of production and circulation required novel forms of territoriality under capitalism (Campling & Colás, 2021). The homogenization of maritime trade into standardizable volumes and turnover times, with ports and firms seeking to increase the former and diminish the latter, necessitates intensifications of terraqueous territoriality, both in terms of spatialities but also labor regimes. The logistical practices developed in the latter half of the twentieth century and intensified in the 21st require a bespoke geography tailor-made for the terraqueous demands of intermodal circulation, exemplified through the container as the standard unit of measurement (Martin, 2013), simultaneously a “maritimisation” of land and “urbanization” of the sea (Adams, 2018). Sand’s granular materiality is necessarily terraqueous, emerging from the interaction between land and water. As much as these enclaves of logistical urbanism rely on standardization, securitization, and surveillance to absolutely minimize the friction present in the transit of commodities, with these spaces pioneering labor regimes without legal rights to collectively organize as well as the racialised repression of local communities, the erection of these abstract, frictionless frontiers of circulation entails the construction of concrete frontiers whose true extent and terms are decidedly opaque, whether in terms of the effects of port dredging on local communities (Zeiderman, 2016), or the considerable granular bulk procured in immense quantities from locales anonymised by non-disclosure agreements. The flat perspicuity of logistical urbanism is guaranteed by turbulence and turbidity stirred up elsewhere: abstract granular materiality is extracted from concrete geomorphological milieus to become a resource, an abstract social nature, which in turn acts as a foundation for concrete strategic geographies of maritime trade that themselves incubate abstract political and social forms that enable greater and faster flows of commodities. These spaces require geosocial subjects shorn of their political capacities to organize and resist the disciplinary modes of surveillance and exploitation which enable these circulations of commodities to take place. Such differentiated labor models require an overseas reserve of labor that will stomach the trade-off between higher wages and collective organization. Sand and labor, intertwined as geosocial subjects, are the prey of state monopsonies, either directly or indirectly through procurement networks, supply chains, special enterprise zones, and other administrative enclaves or loopholes. To demarcate the granular frontiers of global trade, in their abstract and concrete expressions, is to understand how sand undergirds terraqueous regimes of planetary urbanization, allowing for the further envelopment of the urban with flows of commodities that enables the reproduction of capital at a global scale.

Conclusion

This article has sought to demarcate three granular frontiers, each with their abstract and concrete modalities which in turn helps us to position urbanization in relation to the elemental, and geomorphological relations of the planet. In the life of urban majorities, granular frontiers surround the edges of cities and projects as erratic and informal processes of resource extraction and development which immerse and fragment livelihoods. They cleave to existing asymmetries in city-making, often manifesting illicit and opaque tendencies that secure the flow of sand to construction and infrastructure projects, regardless of the consequences. Following Simone, the margins of urbanization are not only spatial forms but social forms as well, which problematize existing categories through which we understand the city, inhabitation, labor, and livelihoods (Simone, 2022). The flexibility of sand’s construction as a resource renders it a porous and flexible commodity which not only geologizes urban political ecologies in particular ways (Dawson, 2021), but also unevenly distributes urban frontiers through its materiality. The degradation of arable land and aquaculture in favor of sand mining to fuel urbanization is the displacement of one metabolism by another through the erratic demarcation of the granular frontier. The opacity and illegality of sand markets across the world point towards a fundamental necessity for sand to be excluded from full marketization through a variety of extra-economic means, whether this constrains the price, or minimizes the political fallout from the socioecological devastation caused by its extraction. This devaluation of sand has a concomitant “geosocial” effect on both agrarian and fishing communities, whose livelihoods become gradually fragmented by the extraction, as its absence leaves turbulence and turbidity in its wake. The demarcation of the granular frontier, then, renders some livelihoods an externality to sand extraction, leaving them precarious and expendable, all the while drawing them into a geophysical relation to urbanization. If political geologists have primarily mobilized stratification as the load-bearing concept of the geosocial, sediment focalizes the dynamic instabilities of geology set adrift by the elements, engendering geosocial forms in which life and non-life are conjoined in excessive and recessive ways (Bremner, 2021; Povinelli, 2016). The isolation of sand from wider geomorphological ensembles geomorphologizes those social formations disturbed by the extraction of its volumes; they negotiate the turbulence of its muddy remainder. This leads us to the question of the surreptitious consonance between the granular materiality of sand as the sedimentary and voluminous correlate of capital: the mineral abundance of the planet translated into a mobile and accumulable commodity to fuel urbanization.

The survival of successful urban models in the Anthropocene, then, will be achieved through the uneven distribution of sediment, coming at the cost of ecologies and communities beyond urban or national borders. Sand as “cheap nature” (Moore, 2015) is simultaneously a geontological function which translates the complex and dynamic materialities of sediment which mediate solidity and fluidity into the abstract social nature of sand. The friction between geomorphological multiplicity and sand’s abstract materiality will intensify as cities and regions across the globe are preparing to mitigate sea level rise, often through infrastructure projects which will rely on sediment to cheaply bind construction materials together into barriers and sea walls. The frontiers of reclamation and sea level rise mitigation are hatching new geosocial and spatial forms that seek to revise and renew the possibility of profitable urban configurations amidst rising tides, mobilizing sediment to produce new urban configurations at the cost of intensifying geomorphological turmoil. The novelty of these configurations should be queried alongside the terms of their resilience; as with Singapore, these supposedly new forms often conceal longer colonial histories shaped through sediment, alongside sand’s centrality as a resource which can reliably produce land as tabula rasa for urban development and nation-building. The granular frontier is undermined by the materiality of sand itself: no matter how solid of a ground it becomes, it still contains within it a porosity, and the possibility it might be set adrift once more.

Finally, we have the granular frontiers of the global trade, in which ports and other logistics operations are revealed to possess their own granular frontiers which produce the flat intermodal territory required for the frictionless circulation of commodities. This expansion of logistical capacity also entails the production of political subjects that ensure the friction of circulation is kept to a minimum, with forms of “logistical citizenship” surfacing as a corollary to this territory, often without any route towards conventional citizenship or even the right to undertake industrial action. Sand and labor are funneled through opaque supply chains from greater and greater distances to facilitate the reproduction of circulation, with port cities like Singapore and urban hubs like Dubai fomenting models ready to be taken up elsewhere as competition upregulates the cutting edge into the standard model. Chua’s concept of the logistics counter-revolution (Chua, 2023), wherein the last 70 years in the development of logistics, alongside the export of manufacturing from the global north to the south, and the internationalization of supply chains, has coincided with the aim of consolidating economic power into neocolonial forms, clarifies the granular frontiers of global trade as the necessary precondition for a counter-revolutionary space–time. The abstraction of sand from sediment leverages the construction of strategic logistical spaces as well as the resilience of speculative urbanisms that incubate novel forms of political subjectivity. The granular frontier bifurcates these subjects: the laboring subject of the worker without rights within this counter-revolutionary space–time, the territory without origin; and the complementary figure of the destitute farmer or fisher outside of that space–time, beyond the pale of that “resilience” that once secured their livelihoods, at the origin of the territory. Attending to how this materiality shapes these spaces renders the frontier porous, as the discontinuities and discrepancies in its commodity chain become located within its construction as an urban resource. Planetary urbanization’s granular frontiers present an opportunity to investigate urbanization without an inside, as these urban forms are determined by sand’s liminality as a resource.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Professor Claire Mercer and Dr Tom Gillespie for putting together this special issue, and for their comments and guidance through an early draft of this paper. I would also like to thank the editor for their steady hand throughout this process, and the reviewers for their comments which have improved this paper in a number of places – any mistakes that remain are my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This article is part of a project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 863944 THINK DEEP).