Paper short abstract:

This paper engages with multiple ways in which sand, mostly invisible in its everydayness and proximity, co-creates Mombasa’s land-sea interface and shapes life in this port city.It ethnographically traces practices of coastal protection, experiences of coastal transformation and heritage discourses

Paper long abstract:

Sand holds a meaningful position in urban coastal areas. As a commodity and building material it is indispensable for the city’s fabric; as coastal sediment, constantly moving between stasis and motion, it is indispensable for the coastal ecosystem. In the face of growing urbanization, climate change and rising sea levels, the value, use and purpose of sand varies between feeding urban neoliberal dreams (privatization, fortification, stabilization of the coast) or its role in naturally protecting the shoreline and maritime-oriented livelihoods.

Based on ethnographic research in Mombasa this paper traces the enmeshment of sand-human lifeworlds in the port city within the tension of an absent presence of sand in everyday littoral life.

By thinking with sand, the hard city of concrete can be seen as a fluid city of negotiations (Dawson 2023) and the shoreline as a relational space situated between terrestrial urban projects, granular matter and the marine ecosystem where complex socio-ecological interactions unfold.

This paper traces various practices of coastal protection, people’s experiences of the urban coast’s im/permanence and coastal heritage projects. Together this opens up new pathways to think about redistribution of expertise, how value is created and how the future of the city is imagined.

Questions are:

How does the city, sand and the sea converse and converge in creating new forms of everyday coastal urbanity?

Which pasts are remembered along the coast? Which futures are manifested and made permanent? By whom and for whom?