Shark Urbanism: Designing for the Ocean’s Keystone Species

Shark Urbanism is a speculative global conservation framework that repositions sharks not as resources to exploit, but as clients to design for. Living on Earth for over 450 million years, sharks are among the ocean’s oldest apex predators and a keystone species essential to regulating marine food webs, sustaining biodiversity, and maintaining ecological balance. Their decline is not only a species crisis, but a planetary one.



Yet sharks are being pushed toward collapse by human activity. In the last 50 years, global shark populations have declined by 90%. More than 240 shark species are under threat, and over 50 species are now classified as critically endangered. At the same time, 8 million tons of plastic enter the ocean every year, contributing to the 1.6 million km² Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Overfishing, shark-fin demand, habitat degradation, pollution, and climate change have together made one of the ocean’s most important species increasingly vulnerable.



This project challenges the human-centered logic that has historically shaped urbanization, infrastructure, and environmental planning. Instead, it proposes a more-than-human design ethic in which sharks are treated as equally deserving of safety, territory, and long-term care. Centering the needs of sharks, the proposal establishes 30.4 million km² of shark metropolises across protected reserves, supported by 500,000+ km of shark highways and walls built from recycled marine debris.



Four development nodes respond directly to the major threats facing sharks: nurseries for breeding and early-life protection, satellite cities for habitat recovery, stewards for surveillance and debris collection, and recycling centers for transforming ocean waste into protective infrastructure. Together, they imagine a cleaner, safer blue planet where endangered species such as the scalloped hammerhead, nurse shark, whale shark, and oceanic whitetip can thrive.