In recent decades, urban reclamation has gained a notorious reputation in numerous shores around the globe. Contrary to its original meaning of value creation, these places witnessed reclamation causing “a complete destruction” of marine habitats, fishing villages, and seascapes (Chancellor 2017). The coastal reclamation boom has been particularly rampant in developmentalist economies. While population growth is often conveniently offered as an excuse, what their reclamation projects envision to accomplish are far from affordable housing. Instead, they are about upscale ocean-view condos, luxurious waterfronts and marinas, urban amenities such as parks and museums, and artificial beaches. Along the way, already vulnerable human and nonhuman communities become further marginalized and displaced. Moreover, this controversiality of reclamation is doubled when a project claims to build a sustainable city, as a pioneering model for our urban future. How can such a city ever claim sustainability when it is built upon devastation—and thereby rendering the lives of original residents irreversibly unsustainable? 

Thus far, this dimension of injustice associated with urban reclamation has been rarely addressed either in urban justice literature or advocacy. Grievances have instead come from local communities, conservation organizations, or scientific groups. It demonstrates the limits of how we have perceived the urban: an isolated island within a given space and time. As Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid have inspired us, however, the urban no longer has an outside (Brenner and Schmid 2014; 2017). Cities can only survive by being connected to their external world in terms of resources and spaces. If this planetary urbanization thesis expands the spatial horizon of cities, reclamation urges us to rethink their temporal horizon: before and after the cities as part of the urban. Redefining the urban with this extended spatial and temporal scope, urban justice faces a new set of questions: Are the locations, grounds, and materials consumed to build cities justly provisioned? Do the cities built on the sea maintain equitable relationships with their surrounding environment and people? If not, how can we create such relationships? 

With these research questions in mind, I introduce Songdo City in South Korea. In the 1980s, the Incheon metropolitan city government planned Songdo, a suburban fishing village area with vast tidal flats, as a supporting town of the Incheon International Airport. Since then, the 17.7 km2 project grew to 53.3 km2 as it earned more titles from the Incheon Economic Free Zone and International City to Ubiquitous City and Eco City. As of 2020, all of the eleven reclamation districts have been grounded, i.e., walled off from the sea. Six districts have even turned into a busy business and residential area, while the other five districts are under construction in varying stages (Figure 2).