MARINE URBANISM

Marine Urbanism

"Even spaces that lie well beyond traditional city cores and suburban peripheries...have become integral parts of the worldwide urban fabric" - Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid

"There is nothing harmonious about the urban as form and reality, for it also incorporates conflict" - Henri Lefebvre

The European Union, with its ambitious targets for CO2 reductions, has become a significant force for the research and design of alternative energy technologies. Many of its energy scenarios, seeking large reductions in fossil fuel use, have planned for the future deployment of offshore wind farming on a massive scale. The energy ambitions of EU nations, however, and the need to put them on a map, effectively create overlapping national extraction territories, as multiple uses and nations compete for finite space. The push for territorial reorganization of the sea highlights the importance of cartographic representation in setting policy, as well as the gaps that still exist before dynamic and representative management of complex marine resources can be achieved.

Of particular interest is the role that visual representation through mapping - or other forms of visualization - has to play in the establishment of political territories, and the impact this has on alternative forms of territoriality that may be more difficult to map. In the North Sea and Baltic Seas, the economic interests at play produce Marine Spatial Plans that exhaustively map the ocean almost as if it were a piece of land. But fish do not heed these maps, nor do the fishermen whose livelihoods depend more on the movements of animals than on lines drawn on paper. The conflicting territorialization of the ocean represents not only different ways of dividing space, but fundamentally different ways of understanding our relationship to marine space. 

Can we even plan for a space we don't fully understand? Is the word plan even appropriate when we are dealing with a volume? How might we find ways of drawing that more fully represent an aquatic world we are not equipped to inhabit, yet persist in colonizing?

Member, Scientific Advisory Committee for Marine Spatial Planning at the BSH/German Federal Ministry for Shipping and Hydrography (Claudia)

Events/publications:

Energy Extraction From Wind: Marine Re-Territorialization In The North Sea published in Scenario Journal 05: "Extraction" (Claudia)

The Sea is not the Land: Alternative Representations for Marine Spatial Planning presented at the Viscous Space conference, TU Delft, June 2018. (Claudia and Lizzie)

Invited Expert, 15th Meeting of the EU Member States Expert Group on Marine Spatial Planning, October 2018 (Claudia)

Keynote Speaker, Connecting Seas Conference, February 2019 (Claudia)

Keynote Speaker, Spatial Strategies at the Land-Sea Interface: Rethinking Marine Spatial Planning Conference, September 2019 (Claudia)

Thick Representations for Oceanic Space published in The Urbanization of the Sea, edited by Nancy Couling and Carola Hein, 2020 (Claudia and Lizzie)