To what extent is it possible to think and design with the non-human? What drives design to turn towards the more-than-human, and why is this discourse situated here in Rotterdam, one of the most engineered cities in the world? Sandlab tried to tackle these questions by looking at a single material—sand— and a very specific Dutch design approach connected to it: ‘Building with Nature’De Vriend, H.J. Van Koningsveld, M. (2012). ‘Building with Nature. Thinking, acting and interacting differently.’ EcoShape..

The workshop referred to sand as an interscalar vehicle – a medium that brings together different scales of being. It combines geological time with human time, ecology with economy and politics. Today, the processing of sand is a multi-billion-dollar business, and the Netherlands are one of the big players due to centuries of experience in so-called reclamation and flood protection work. To ‘reclaim’ means to take back what used to belong to one. However, most reclamation projects create new land where there used to be sea.

Every year, the Netherlands extract 12 million m³ of sand from the North Sea for coastal nourishment and another 13 million m³ for industry purposes. With rising sea levels caused by climate change demand is projected to rise by 7 million m³Ibid. p. 25. At the same time the long-term impact of dredging on the environment is not sufficiently studied. Faulty implementation of dredging can lead to coastal erosion and flooding.

Sand is one of the five resources with the highest global demand being in the centre stage of political, economic and ecological warfare.

In the form of quartz and silica sand is essential to the technological infrastructures shaping our everyday life; as cement and steel it acts as the literal building block of modernity; in the form of land mass it demarcates the poor and the rich—those who mine and export land and those who import and “recover”. 

In order to understand the agency nature has in ‘Building with Nature’ we visited Maasvlakte 2— a large-scale design project that transformed 240 million m³ of sand from the North Sea into 2000 hectares of landIbid. p. 26. Maasvlatke 2 is the biggest ongoing sand transformation project in the Netherlands developed with “sustainability as a main concern” explains our tour guide at FutureLand, Maasvlakte 2’s own visitor information centre. Building ‘with’ nature as opposed to building ‘in’ or ‘of’ nature is considered less reactive, “utilizing natural processes and providing opportunities for nature as part of the infrastructure development process.”Ibid. p. 9 In practice this means, for example, that no hard defence is employed—that is concrete dykes which separate land from sea—but artificial beaches and dunes create transition zones, a so-called soft defence. 

“Ships which don’t run on diesel receive a discount on entering the harbour,” our guide continues, and “you can see seals in the port every day”. What appears to be a successful and harmonious engineering project in fact took 20 years and millions of euros in research investment to assess the environmental impact before the building phase started in 2008. The latest extension of Rotterdam’s harbour was built in a Nature 2000 protected area, raising concerns with environmentalists. According to the European Commission, Nature 2000 protected area “offers a haven to Europe's most valuable and threatened species and habitats. Stretching over 18% of the EU’s land area and almost 9,5% of its marine territory, it is the largest coordinated network of protected areas in the world.”

One can find those 20 years of research, privately funded by the Port of Rotterdam Authorities, in a sealed box on display at FutureLand.

Our tour guide doubts that the studies are publicly available. What he doesn’t mention, and probably doesn’t know, is that the impact of such a massive engineering project on the ecosystem is impossible to foresee. There are no reference projects of projects of this scale, and even if there were, each marine ecosystem features different characteristics. Rather than predicting success in advance, assessing the damage done in hindsight is how engineering progresses within the logic of ‘Building with Nature’. Still, most control periods only last a few decades, and long-term effects are largely unknown. Geoengineering might be a quick fix, but it’s not a long-term solution to the rising sea level.

Projects like Maasvlakte 2 show that once there is a (economical) will, there is always a way. The European Commission granted the permission to build the new harbour under the condition of ‘compensating’ for the environmental loss. A certain economical thinking and the corresponding use of language strikes the careful observer when listening to the tour guide or reading the promotional material handed out at FutureLand: “The biggest European harbour”, “the deepest seabed”, “the most gigantic container ships carrying 21,413 container units”, “contributing 3,1% of gross domestic product”, “17 million containers per year”Maasvlakte in 2035: Incentive for Economy, Environment and Quality of Life. Port of Rotterdam. Havenbedrijf Rotterdam N.V. 201703ID-FS021.

Maasvlakte 2 seem to be mainly an economic success and a showcase to export Dutch engineering. “Recently, I showed around a group of Canadians who were brought here to get convinced that building a sustainable harbour is in fact possible – they were amazed by seeing all the birds we have here”, our tour guide goes on. Dutch dredging companies Boskalis and Van Oord operate worldwide while research institutes EcoShape and Deltates consult and monitor the processes. There is barely a reclamation project without Dutch involvement. Against this backdrop, I’m caught by surprise when Henk Nieboer, director of EcoShape, tells me that Maasvlakte 2 is not the economic success it appears to be but driven by a desire for supremacy: To be at the forefront of innovation and to outpace the European competition, is what drove the development of Maasvlakte 2. The alleged agency of nature thus is confined by political and economic constraints.

An artificial island couldn’t function without the sand that it’s made of, its edgy shape and the inherent quality to stick together, the outer and inner forces that hold it in place, the currents that form it and so on and so forth.

To think with the non-human, the material, might be helpful for understanding the relationality of all being.

But where this approach falls short is in explaining what creates an artificial island in the first place, and how and by whom this decision is informed. Processes of creation and destruction go hand in hand. 

In ‘The Science of the Artificial’ Herbert Simon famously states: to design is “to devise courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones”Simon, H. (1996). The Sciences of the Artificial. Third Edition. MIT Press: pp.111-167.. In the case of Maasvlakte 2, and despite the label of ‘Building with Nature’, its design is driven by a human desire for supremacy. All kinds of design, including those projects which run under the label of sustainable design, involve terraforming processes, if only so minor. Design therefore can’t neglect its material entanglement and its complicity in the crisis it tries to tackle.