UH Talk 8 | Inheriting the Coast: Sand, Drift, and the Making of Freetown

Freetown’s growth follows the coast and devours its sand — a heritage of extraction inherited from the colonial experiments that once mapped the city through segregation and disease control. Today, its shifting shorelines feed a speculative urbanism built on what the sea yields and erases. At John Obey beach, where tides, labour, and longing converge, sand becomes both livelihood and loss, the measure of a city remaking itself grain by grain. Through voices of miners, migrants, and returnees, this talk reflected on what it means to inherit a city that consumes its own ground — its coast, its memory, its future.