Cities are not static objects. They are restless creatures that are always shifting, eroding, expanding, and rebuilding themselves. Sometimes they do so invisibly, like a tree thickening at its core. Other times, with the drama of an earthquake or a skyline crane. But in all cases, cities are engaged in an unending act of self-editing. They grow not only upward and outward, but also downward and inward - through excavation, demolition, infill, and reclamation.
Nowhere is this impulse more physically tangible than in land reclamation, that is, the act of creating new land where there was once water. It's a strange inversion of natural order: humans pulling earth out of the sea, sculpting topography like editors rearranging paragraphs. Often, the material used is not fresh or pure, but the cast-offs of older ambitions. Rubble, sand, spoil, and ash. In this way, cities become palimpsests that re-write themselves with the debris of their pasts.
Take New York. One of the lesser-known legacies of the Second World War is the massive deposit of rubble from bombed-out London that now rests beneath the surface of Manhattan’s East River shoreline. After the Blitz left the British capital scarred and crumbling, ships carrying military supplies from the US to the UK were ballasted on their return journey with bricks, concrete, shattered stone. Rather than sail back empty, they sailed heavy with ruin. That rubble now forms part of the foundations of FDR Drive and the East River Esplanade. So when you jog along that river’s edge, you’re treading on a ghosted echo of London.
A different story, but no less haunting, lies under Cape Town’s foreshore. In the mid-20th century, the city decided to stretch itself seaward. The shallow Table Bay was dredged, drained, and filled mostly using material mined from the flank of Table Mountain itself. The very stone that once loomed above the city was carted down, crushed, and packed into the ocean to make room for highways, office towers, and apartheid-era administrative sprawl. Cape Town, in a sense, amputated its geography to extend its reach.
Dubai, of course, has turned this act into performance art. The Palm Jumeirah and The World Islands are feats of fantastical engineering. Sand sculpted into real estate. These projects go further than just editing the city - they rewrite coastlines, inviting capital to colonize the sea itself. But beneath the dazzle lies the same logic: the city as an assertion of control over nature, a space in constant rearrangement.
Even Venice, a city born on water, owes its survival to dredging, infilling, and reinforcing. The Dutch, too, have mastered this balance of sea and soil for centuries, claiming land through dikes and polder systems that are both elegant and existential. Their landscapes are not "natural" in any traditional sense. They are entirely curated.
Each of these examples speaks to a larger truth: cities are not built only by architects and planners, but by the movement of matter itself. Land, in these cases, is not something given but rather it is something made. Often violently. Always purposefully. And it forces us to consider what lies beneath our streets and towers - not just in geological terms, but in moral ones too.
At Pemba, we see these stories as part of a larger narrative about urban becoming. Reclamation isn't just about land; it's about identity, memory, and momentum. What we bury and what we build are part of the same gesture.