Dispossession of Land and Sea: Resisting Urbanormativity in Bahrain
In the small island-state of Bahrain, authorities have extensively employed coastal land reclamation as an urban development strategy, under the guise of land scarcity, following models seen in the Netherlands, Singapore, and Hong Kong. These efforts have drastically reshaped the island’s coastline and sparked collective nostalgia for the lost seascapes. For Bahrainis, the coast once served as a space for leisure, economic activities such as shipbuilding, fishing, and pearling, and as an environmental common. Dredging has demolished traditional hadhras (fish traps), hayrat (oyster banks), and chawachib (freshwater springs). Despite its detrimental impact on the marine habitat, dredging and reclamation projects have created numerous artificial landforms in the middle of the sea, ostensibly to address the housing shortage. However, these developments predominantly consist of luxury seafront projects, unaffordable for the majority of the population.
This paper examines equal public claims to both land and sea in the context of ‘dispossession of land.’ The pressures of Gulf urbanization have pushed for a uniform, urban-centered development model that often marginalizes traditional coastal communities and their intimate connection to both land and sea. Through archival research and ethnographic fieldwork in Bahrain’s western seaside villages, I explore how community-led action is challenging conventional economic and urban development approaches in the region, aiming to preserve communal access to maritime spaces and to resist the privatization of coastal territories. Reflecting on Bahrain’s history of feudalism and the legacy of British colonialism—when the island was used as a naval base in the twentieth century—this paper argues that reclaiming access to the coast is a means of preserving rural forms of life in the face of Gulf urbanormativity.