Ocean Metabolism
Planetary Urbanism Competition, 2015
Project Team:
Rania Ghosn + El Hadi Jazairy
Larisa Ovalles, Christopher Reznich, Chen Lu, Aaron Weller, Muneerah Alrabe, Claudia Bode, Shuqi He, Yu-Hsiang Lin
The ocean is the next great frontier, as countries race to claim resources made newly available through anthropogenic climate change (such as melting ice caps) or technological advances. The instrument of this territorial expansion is the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), an imaginary line drawn 200 nautical miles into the ocean from the edge of a political entity, traditionally defined as the limit of dry land. Since countries have some rights to the exploitation of their EEZ under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), they have a vested interest in expanding their EEZ to include these newly accessible or newly discovered resources. A case study is China, which is attempting to extend its territorial claim over the East China Sea by defining its land boundary not through what is dry, but rather by the extent of its continental shelf.
What if the race for the deep ocean were made through the technical legality of the EEZ, where worthless territory is added to a nation-state only in order to extend the 200 mile offset that is the EEZ so that it encompasses desirable resources? What if technologies for island-building advanced to the point that it became impossible for observers to detect whether an island is existing or new, allowing countries to construct artificial archipelagos and claim they allow for an extension of the EEZ? The design of new island archipelagos would become important not because of the inherent qualities of the islands themselves, but because of their relationships to each other. An ideal "pioneer" archipelago would consist of minimally sized islands, secretly constructed, 400 nautical miles from one another, arranged strategically so that their 200 mile offsets encompass desired resources.
What if those islands could move, replicate, breed? Island-building as manifest destiny.
The three geostories: Ecological Extension Zone (EEZ): Biodiversity Constellation Reserves; Floating Waste Continent: Social Utopia; EEZ Mining Archipelagos: Territorial Expansions.