Land reclamation history spans Boston to Tokyo, report finds

A new report on land reclamation highlights historical projects that created land from water, including half of Boston, a quarter of Manhattan, and 15% of San Francisco before 1970. The report, referenced by Tyler and written by Zigmund Forrest and Max Tabarrok in Works in Progress, also includes a historical overview by Connor Tabarrok covering the ancient Iraqi city of Ur, Alexander the Great’s siege of Tyre, and flood tanks under Tokyo. Connor Tabarrok, a civil engineer, notes that most land reclamation historically aimed to create farmland through drainage rather than building cities. The US Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that wetlands in the lower 48 states declined from 221 million acres in the 1780s to 104 million by the 1980s, a loss of roughly 117 million acres at a rate of 60 acres per hour for 200 years. The report states that America has drained substantially more wetland than it has built city, with nearly all drained land becoming farmland. In the Netherlands, Flevoland province, reclaimed from the Zuiderzee in the 1950s and 1960s, covers 1,410 square kilometers and was laid out as an agricultural basin, not a city. The report also notes that land drainage historically helped reduce mosquito-driven malaria and improve sewage, citing the example of the Potomac Flats in Washington, D.C., where the Army Corps of Engineers created more than 600 acres of new ground in the 1880s, now home to the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials and cherry trees.

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Sources: marginalrevolution.com