Chapter 8 Sanded: Sedimented Pasts and Shored Futures in ‘Outer’ Singapore
In: Coastal UrbanitiesSearch for other papers by Rapti Siriwardane-de Zoysa in
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Abstract
In the history of human civilization, never was a substance rendered so amorphous as sand. Comparable to salt and latterly fossil fuels, sand remains deeply embedded – of not ingrained – in everyday life, as a resource and as metaphor that is as sacred as it is banal. This chapter revisits the everyday politics and poetics of contemporary sand, as remembered, embodied and contested. We draw inspiration from the island city-state of Singapore, recognised for having its own thwarted relationship with illicit flows of sand resourced from the archipelagic region’s extensive foreshore coastal reclamation over decades. Drawing on coastal anthropology and post-natural scholarship, this chapter traces how sand is enlivened in remaking urban futures. Enlisted not only as a commodity in geo-engineered terraforming and state-building, we also consider how sand – as substance and symbol – exists in the interstices of urban aspirational identity-making and inter-generational memory. To do so, we reflect on the making of an “artificial” beach on Lazarus Island, a space in-between that offers to be read against the grain of what constitutes as mainland and outer periphery.