Terra Potentia: The World-making Force of Dredging

Project description

The Terra Potentia project examines the little studied but profoundly transformative phenomenon of navigation dredging. As ports across the world deepen their harbors to accommodate ever-larger oceangoing ships, dredging is assuming a more prominent role in coastal environmental management and policy. First, the project investigates how dredging firms and state entities develop technologies, analytical techniques, financial mechanisms, and capital to accomplish harbor deepening projects and ship channel expansions. Second, we examine four case studies across the European Union and the United States to evaluate the role of dredging in producing situated environmental transformations in coastal and riverine landscapes. Drawing on a mixed methods incorporating qualitative and geospatial approaches, we approach dredging as an economic and technical practice that connects the demands of port and maritime development with changing landscapes and waterscapes in and around major ports. The project will contribute the first multi-sited case study of the economic geography and political ecology of dredging and sediment movement. The project will reveal how the technical, political and economic process of dredging produces environmental change and impacts natural resources and human communities.

IDOS component: The Multi-modal Port: Elbe River Fairway Deepening, Hamburg (Lead: Jonas Hein)

The Port of Hamburg is a multi-modal estuarine port located approximately 120 km from the North Sea. A leading port since mediaeval times, it is now the third largest in Europe. The port boasts private and state-run container terminals, mixed and bulk cargo terminals, car loading terminals, and plans to develop an “energy and climate port” focused on the import and production of hydrogen. The port’s hinterland includes Germany and Central Europe through railroad, inland water transport and road networks. This case study focuses on the production of space in the Elbe estuary and contestations around the impacts of efforts to transform a dynamic estuarine landscape into a standardised port infrastructure. The project will explore the contested knowledge and spatial politics of port expansion, dredging and the enlargement of terrestrial and marine sediment disposal sites, which have been contested by environmental NGOs, fishers, estuarine municipalities and residents of Hamburg's southern marshland districts.