Claiming Prestige: Shaping the Future of Artificial Coastal Development"

Prestige reclamation is defined as coastal reclamation carried out for the purpose of high-end real estate development and luxury recreation. The planiforms of these reclamations are often highly complex ideograms, showcasing the investor’s wealthand maximising the number of waterfront properties. Over time, increasingly elaborate designs are being built, leading to ever more complex coasts of which the wider impact to the coast is poorly understood. 

As these constructions are becoming more common, we raise a series of critical questions on the ecological, societal and environmental status of these highly anthropomorphised coasts. In this presentation we highlight ten key global prestige reclamation sites; showcasing trends in design, diversity of symbolic representation and resource demands, to demonstrate common themes found widely across the existing prestige reclamations. Time series analysis of reclamation shows both the construction timeframes, but also the large gap in time between construction and further development, questioning the drivers for development. This presentation aims to spark conversations on these unique coastlines, and bring further attention and global collaboration to collectively study their impact on the wider coastal environment.