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‘The world is sinking:’ sand, urban infrastructure, and world-cities

ABSTRACT From the construction of ports to the dredging of access corridors for ships and the production of asphalt and concrete, sand is an inextricable part of urban environments. Focusing on the molecular transformations of sand–from silt to concrete to rubble–the first half of this paper studies the geosocial history of Dubai over the course of the twentieth century, including the dredging of Dubai Creek, the making of Jebel Ali Port, and the construction of the World Islands. I draw on reports, archival records, and newspapers, as well as existing scholarship, to demonstrate the infrastructural exuberance of Dubai, its tendency to marshal vast amounts of sand in the construction of increasingly outrageous infrastructures. In the second half of the paper, I follow some of the threads that emerge from this site in a more theoretical and comparative register. I draw comparisons between Dubai and similar world–cities in the global South, to understand and critique how this infrastructural exuberance exists alongside increasing concerns over ‘sand scarcity'. Drawing on the work of Georges Bataille (1991. The accursed share: volume 1: consumption, tr. by Hurley, R. New York: Zone Books), Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1983. Anti–oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia, tr. by Hurley, R. New York, NY: Penguin Classics; 1987. A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia, tr. by Massumi, B. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), and McKenzie Wark (2015. Molecular red: theory for the anthropocene. New York: Verso), I develop a framework of antiproductive ecologies that treats incommensurable forms of surplus and waste (such as sand and rubble) as constitutive of world–cities. Developing Deleuze and Guattari's concept of ‘antiproduction’ from an environmental perspective, I argue that in their exuberance and thirst for construction, world–cities like Dubai attempt to organize and render productive the very planetary distribution of sand and silt.