Edited Volume »Granular Configurations«

The edited volume »Granular Configurations: Sand, Materiality and Planetary Urbanization« will bring together contributions from geography, geology, social sciences, art, and humanities that investigate sand as a medium, material, and object of study.

Sand’s existence is manifold. As a sediment, it communicates histories and activities; it clings to skins and winds, transports conditions and milieus. Sand’s tendency to continuously decompose contrasts with its application as the most used construction material in the world. Its granular physics, at times liquid, at other times solid, produces a metastable condition that defies human mastery. Its opaque belonging, being constantly on the move via the forces of wind and water, challenges the stable categories of ownership assigned to sand as territorial marker. From movements of sand and logistical schedules that intermingle and intensify in London’s wharves, to granularity as a resource format which allows us to study how natural materials are brought into circulation, an eye towards processes of transformation denaturalizes sand economies. Connections between sand, gender and labor become foregrounded when cheap housing in Turkey built with illegally procured sand crumbles after earthquakes and so-called sand mafias in the Global South extract and trade sand with deadly effects for society and environment. But the sudden occurrence and disappearance of sands can also bear witness to lost worlds such as when streams of sand blowing from Western Sahara towards Canary Islands transport memories of extractive colonialism, or Indonesia’s flooded coast enable environmental justice movements by those who suffered from replacement.

The volume makes a much-needed contribution to discourses on materiality in urban and cultural studies, anthropology, human geography, and political ecology centering on sand as the most contested but overlooked material for the built environment.