Sand Wars

Eons ago, I read a book on a related topic by a Cdn author with the quirky name of Silver Donald Cameron - which spoke of the issues of retaining beaches - which mostly comes down to 'stealing' the sand from where the ocean wants to take it - at great cost to all concerned - the beach, the taxpayers, and the next town down the shore...

Sand Wars

via Pruned by Alexander Trevi on 7/16/08

(Houses on stilts on Nags Head, North Carolina. Photo by Stephan Delfour-Given/AFP/Getty Images.)

In a familiar story that may yet become all too familiar to everybody in a climate-changed future, the Italian cities of "industrial Brindisi" and "elegant, baroque Lecce" are battling each other over sand.

Quoting The Guardian:

Faced with losing the pristine San Cataldo beach to creeping Adriatic sea currents, the town of Lecce in Puglia arranged to dig up 200,000 cubic metres of sand out at sea in front of neighbour - and rival - Brindisi. But with EU-funded work set to start proud locals in the port city of Brindisi rose up in protest, with 10,000 signing a petition to stop the digging, hundreds forming a human chain along their own, eroding, beach, and fans at a local football match unfurling a banner stating: "Don't touch the sand."

As interesting as this tale of mineral piracy is, it would be moreso if we were to hear that a landscape architecture firm has been commissioned to do some sort of project to be sited on this stretch of contested coastline.

Not only will they have to maneuver through a potentially explosive political landscape but the designers must simultaneously attend to the physical forces at work in this coastal landscape — such as beach erosion and surfzone currents — that, while much is now known about them relative to just a few decades ago, are still largely mysterious.

Maybe there is a competition for a new beachfront promenade or another Trump golf course or one of those so-called eco-towns or just a sprawling mansion for a chief executive and his family as a summer retreat from the city. The project site is no longer in Puglia but in a barrier island, such as North Carolina's Nags Head, pictured above. It's a mobile landscape, a fragile terrain always in danger of collapse, where everything is beyond the control of engineering. Entrants will have to navigate between programs of containment and resilience, between settlement and retreat, between conflicting ideas of permanence and impermanence.

And all entries will be the best projects ever. Obviously.

In any case, to return back to Italy, after Lecce was ordered to stop digging for sand, officials there were asked where they will now get their material from? The will import it from economically desperate Albania — which, of course, means that it will be another case of the rich exploiting the poor to maintain their quality of life and the exploited is left with a degraded landscape.

In the Archives:
Climate Ghettos

Related:
The Retreating Village