Paper short abstract:

This paper explores projects of coastal protection in Durban, South Africa, through the vantage of sand. It sheds light on human-sand relations and their role in (un)making coastal life, while also showing how they are tied into larger infrastructures of resource extraction and urban governance.

Paper long abstract:

There are very few stories about sand as something else then a construction material, used for stabilizing infrastructures. This calls for new ways of reckoning with marginality, informality and supposedly infinite yet marginal resources such as sand. This paper seeks to rethink the trajectory of urban development and coastal protection and gain awareness of the need to focus on local initiatives in resource use and local meanings of sand.

On the basis of theoretically informed accounts and as preparation for in-depth ethnographic research with coastal dwellers in Durban this paper is concerned with the multiple ways in which sand, mostly invisible in its everydayness and proximity, accretes and erodes in the port city of Durban, having following underlying questions in mind:

- How does sand organize and govern coastal protection in Durban? Who controls and claims sand for what purposes, on what scale and temporality? How, in turn, does sand control various actors differently?

- Who formulates and dominates discourses and narratives around sand and coastal protection and how do they get appropriated and hybridized? What are the consequent tensions between extractive practices and innovative possibilities?

- How might thinking with sand inform our theories of urban nature?