Dredge Capital

For the precirculated manuscript Dredge Capital: Political Geomorphology and the Contradictions of Sediment Accumulation please contact Robert Gioielli, gioielli@kth.se.

Abstract

'The contemporary conjuncture of the climate crisis, infrastructural expansion, planetary urbanization and ecological disruption has sharpened scholarly and political attention to the material foundations of capitalist development. Infrastructure, in particular, has received more attention from geographers and scholars in cognate fields interested in better understanding how capital reshapes both the built environment and natural world. Yet the geophysical work that enables these infrastructures to exist at all—especially the large-scale movement of sediment—remains largely invisible in critical debates on infrastructure and environment.

This paper positions dredging as a central but underexamined practice through which global capitalism continually remakes the Earth system. By tracing the historical emergence and global expansion of the Dutch–Belgian dredging industry cluster, we conceptualize dredge capital as a material and institutional formation that reorganizes geohydrological systems to sustain accumulation, even as it generates new ecological contradictions. The paper thus intervenes in current debates within political ecology, critical infrastructure studies, and critical physical geography by foregrounding the geomorphological dimensions of capitalist expansion—how capital not only flows through but also physically reshapes the land and waterscapes upon which it depends. Understanding dredging as both infrastructural and geomorphological practice reveals how the physical manipulation of sediment is inseparable from the political economies of global trade, transportation, energy, and urbanization.

In an era defined by the twin imperatives of climate adaptation and sustained economic growth, the global operations of dredge capital occupy a pivotal yet paradoxical position: they are tasked with mitigating the very environmental crises their past interventions have triggered. By situating the rise of dredge capital within the Rhine-Meuse Delta and following its subsequent globalization, this paper develops political geomorphology as a framework for analyzing how capital accumulation is embedded in, and generative of, increasingly large-scale geohydrolgical processes. Our analysis demonstrates that contemporary capitalism’s capacity to endure environmental disruption depends increasingly on its ability to mobilize dredging as a spatial and geomorphological fix to its own crises of accumulation and ecological instability.

Key words: sediments, dredging, geomorphology, political ecology, Rhine-Muese Delta

Authors: Joshua Lewis, Henrik Ernstson, Jonas Hein, and Ashley Carse