Terra-Sorta-Firma: Reclaiming the Littoral Gradient [Hardcover]

A critical and interdisciplinary exploration of our worlds continuously urbanizing and expanding coastline.

For centuries, cities have grown and expanded onto previously saturated grounds; reclaiming land from estuaries, marshes, mangroves, and seabeds. While these artificial coastlines are sites of tremendous real estate, civic, and infrastructural investments, they are also the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

Terra-Sorta-Firma documents the global extent of reclaimed coastal lands, and provides a framework for comparison across varying geographies, cultures, and histories. It renders visible the ubiquity and precarity of urban coastal reclamation in an age of increased environmental and economic indeterminacy.

It challenges designers, developers, policymakers, engineers, and urbanists to reconsider the design and construction of land itself, and to re-imagine this most fundamental of all infrastructures along a gradient of inundation.ES"This book challenges designers, developers, policymakers, engineers, and urbanists to reconsider the design and construction of land itself, and to re-imagine this most fundamental of all infrastructures along a gradient of inundation."--John Hill, A Daily Dose of Architecture"With a focus on waterlogged, marshy, and sandy edges where urban growth meets the sea, Terra-Sorta-Firma offers a comprehensive look at coastal edges and the ways they've been manipulated....  The book's detailed analysis of sand and its use in creating artificial terrain, for example, discusses international fleets of dredging vessels, diagrams of beach management, and a piece by Atelier NL on sand at the granule level." --Landscape Architecture Magazine