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Paper short abstract

This paper analyzes the Billion Oyster Project, a nonprofit restoring oyster reefs in the New York Harbor for climate risk mitigation, as a technopolitical regime which mobilizes oysters’ cultural associations and materiality to inscribe “nature” in urban spaces as infrastructure.

Paper long abstract

In this paper, I describe the Billion Oyster Project (BOP) – a nonprofit organization founded in 2014 coordinating the restoration (administration, fabrication, installation, maintenance, and monitoring) of native Eastern Oyster (Crassostrea Virginica) reefs in the New York Harbor (Billion Oyster Project, 2025) – as an actor-network (Callon, 1986; Latour 2005) that enrolls the Eastern Oyster as urban infrastructure. I articulate this network to stage a critique of the technopolitical regime – tightly integrated institutions, myths, histories and ideologies, and artifacts (Hecht, 2009) – which belies projects inscribing oyster reefs as a form of ‘natural’ infrastructure in several cities in the eastern United States.

Although ‘nature as infrastructure’ has been sharply critiqued as an urban development ethos (Carse, 2014; Gabrys, 2022; Parks, 2020), and separately, much work has applied actor-network theory to bivalve mollusks (Callon, 1986; Gilbert, 2023), until recently there has been little reason to consider oyster reefs a kind of urban infrastructure. Now situated as such (Wakefield, 2020), the Eastern Oyster is being enrolled in technopolitical regimes as urban shoreline infrastructures across the American Northeast. Based on ethnographic observation and institutional, social media, and policy corpora, in this article I articulate one such technopolitical regime and demonstrate how it draws on both the materiality and cultural history of oysters to inscribe them as “natural” infrastructure.

Keywords: actor-network theory, technopolitical regime, Eastern Oyster, Billion Oyster Project, nature as infrastructure