Flows of Sand: Human-Sand Entanglements in the Coastal City of Mombasa, Kenya

My research will explore the multiple social lives and trajectories of sand in the coastal urban context of Mombasa, Kenya. By this, I want to move beyond an extractivist understanding of sand whose main value is seen in capitalist concreting of the environment.

As in any other city, sand is integral to Mombasa’s life and existence. It builds the backbone of urban development and infrastructures, like roads, bridges, ports, houses, breakwaters. It crosses the boundary between the city and the ocean, is sometimes fluid and volatile, then hard and fix in place, it is drawn from deep under the ground and forms the compound for high-rises.  It shifts its form, shape, and direction, as it moves toward the city, becoming cement, concrete, a port promenade, the soil for mangrove restoration initiatives, the medium for protesting against dredging vessels or the connector and buffer at the shore, protecting land and stabilizing the coast.

Although sand as a building material or scarce resource has obtained broader attention in recent years, little is known about how sandscapes leak into its surroundings and into which its surroundings leak in turn. What social practices, politics, networks, economies, frictions and imaginaries exist along urban sand’s trajectories? And how does resource-specific material conditions enable, foreclose, subvert and (un)make coastal urban life?

Thinking with sand along the notion of leakage (and seepage) might be useful, for tracing the dimensionality of urban social sandscapes, the material behaviors and temporal junctures sand can have. It also points to the failure of containment and barriers when something seeps or leaks. By highlighting a different way of thinking the terrain of borders that define the prevailing knowledge of sand, the concept of leakage/seepage could brace a non-binary approach, being sensitive to power relations, and to draw a more fragmented picture of sand-human entanglements.