The talk intervenes in geographic debates across 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. The conjuncture of the climate crisis, planetary urbanization and ecological disruption has sharpened scholarly and political attention to the material dimensions of capitalist development. In geography and cognate fields, infrastructure has emerged as an analytical concept and set of material phenomena for understanding how capital reshapes the built environment and natural world. And yet, the large-scale earth moving work that underpins many infrastructures—literally or operationally—has received limited attention in these conversations. We approach dredging as a central but underexamined practice through which global capitalism shapes and is, in turn, shaped by earth systems. By tracing the historical emergence, global expansion, and dominant position of the Dutch-Belgian dredging industry cluster, we theorize and historicize dredge capital as a material and institutional formation that reorganizes geohydrological systems to sustain accumulation, even as it generates ecological contradictions. Our analysis demonstrates that, in the age of logistics-led development and climate anxiety, 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.
Henrik Erntsson is Professor and Docent in Political Ecology at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Honorary Senior Research Scholar in Human Geography at The University of Manchester, UK, where he previously worked as Lecturer. He was Honorary Associate Professor in Urban Studies at the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town, where he lived and worked for almost a decade, and was Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford University’s History Department. His current research evolves around urban political ecology and Southern/postcolonial urbanism linking this to wider geographical processes with a focus on the extractive continuities of the green energy transition and dredging as a world-making industrial force.
