The City as Urban Reef

Reflections on the habitation of the Coral Triangle

This article won second place as part of our biannual writing contest and is featured in the January 2013 issue of Dimensions, "House of Cards: The perilous state of global biodiversity".

When the world was much younger, Spanish conquistadors crisscrossed the erstwhile-uncharted Pacific in search of passages to the Indies and other fabled lands of the Orient. In their logs, these sailors wrote of many a strange sea creature caught writhing in their nets, or of monsters they had espied spouting and churning the waves from afar. They described too how natives of islands along the way snared turtles with carapaces larger than shields, or fished for limbless undines of the most delectable flesh. Soon, much of what had been encountered in terra incognita and mare liberum was named and subdued, as Europeans and latter-day Americans founded many settlements along the Pacific Rim from the 15th to the 19th centuries. In some cases, these explorers integrated themselves permanently by conquest, trade and intermarriage into indigenous seaboard communities that were already thriving in a region of diverse co-existing cultures that would later be called Southeast Asia.

16 January 2013 | Read more