Urban oceans: our cities are radically transforming the marine environment

Australian cities identify as coastal, we tend to limit our discussions of the urban-ocean intersection to our love for living by the beach or, more pragmatically, the economic potential of ports for international trade. The occasional controversy regarding shark culls and netting aside, surprisingly little is made of the complex relationship between cities and the sea and those who inhabit each, or how urban processes are increasingly extending far into the ocean. Perhaps much of this disregard can be attributed to what geographers Philip Steinberg and Kimberley Peters have termed a ‘landward bias’; that is, privileging dry land for attention over the colossal volume of the ocean.

Cottesloe beach, Perth.

Indeed, we find it difficult to even attach urban characteristics to this vast mass of water. However, the ocean has supported urban development since at least the fifteenth century. It was not only an essential component in the colonisation of territories by Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but also fundamental to the establishment of lucrative commercial ventures, slave trade networks and massive resource-extraction operations across the world, pre-empting modern globalisation processes that structure the key connections between and within cities today.

Read the Foreground story by Charity Edwards - “Urban oceans: our cities are radically transforming the marine environment.”