Book Review: Beach Politics: Social, Racial, and Environmental Injustice on the Shoreline

Several times each month, we are pleased to republish a recent book review from the Canadian Law Library Review (CLLR). CLLR is the official journal of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL/ACBD), and its reviews cover both practice-oriented and academic publications related to the law.

Beach Politics: Social, Racial, and Environmental Injustice on the Shoreline. Edited by Setha Low. New York: NYU Press, 2025. 336 p. Includes bibliographic references and index. ISBN 9781479821952 (softcover) US$35.00; ISBN 9781479821945 (hardcover) US$99.00; ISBN 9781479821969 (eBook) US$25.00.

Reviewed by Emma Cornelius
Reference Librarian
Lawson Lundell LLP

Beach Politics answers two core questions: Why is the public losing access to the beach worldwide, and what are the effects of this loss, particularly on marginalized peoples? I was eager to read this collection of essays and learn more about the mechanics of beach access and restriction. In Lima, Peru, where I spent a good part of my upbringing, there is a stark contrast between the crowded, lively public beaches south of the city and the quiet, spacious beaches of wealthier gated communities in the area. I have close family ties in Far North Queensland, Australia, where environmental preservation of the reef is always a matter of concern. Public access to the beach for recreation and sightseeing sits in tension with protection of the precious ecosystems there.

Editor Setha Low brings together a wealth of expertise and lived experience in this collection. The outcome is a well-rounded book that will give readers a nuanced understanding of beaches as political spaces. The beach becomes not just a place to visit, enjoy, manage, or protect, but a space where the surrounding communities’ varied concerns, attitudes, and identities converge with global economic and social trends. This makes the beach worthy of study as a political space where social and climate justice, colonialism and racism, and power and resistance meet.

The book has fifteen chapters, split into four parts. These four parts mirror the broad strategies employed to restrict public access to the beach: governance, shoring up the coastline, racialization of the beach, and development. The boundaries between each part are somewhat blurred, however, as the four themes overlap and recur throughout the book.

Part I sets up the theoretical framework of beaches as political spaces. With a focus on Connecticut’s beaches, Andrew W. Kahrl’s introductory essay tracks the trajectory toward privatization of U.S. beaches throughout the 20th century. We learn that the value of beach real estate increased massively in the 20th century, resulting in a landgrab of beach land in favour of private ownership, real estate development, and governance over access to the beach. Kahrl reasons that these tactics were aimed at keeping Black people out of coastal communities and maintaining the “character” of white neighbourhoods. Part I also explores the tensions seen in protests against beach governance, and how protest groups with differing aims and perspectives often leverage similar narratives and language.

Part II reveals the tension between the protection of private property and the protection of the beach as an ecosystem and public space. Private property interests are often, it turns out, at odds with what is best for the beach. Common beachside features used to protect coastal communities— including boardwalks, seawalls, and retainers—often privilege private landowners over long-term environmental and public interests. A highlight is Benjamin Heim Shepard’s insightful chapter on the grassroots community protest over New York’s East River Park. Protestors mobilized when the city rejected a community consensus plan to keep trees and public land in favour of a developer-friendly plan to instate a seawall and build up the shoreline with concrete and synthetic turf.

In Part III, authors explore how restricting public access to the beach is often tied to protecting whiteness by excluding or removing BIPOC people from the beach. These aims are usually hidden under layers of narratives designed to create plausible deniability. Here, the essays take us from Queens, New York, to Albuquerque, New Mexico, and then to South Africa and Brazil. We see how whiteness and the right to leisure and vacation become interlaced, and how white entitlement shows up across these diverse cultural contexts.

Part IV introduces the beach as central to economic activity and to keeping up with demands for development and tourism. In the final chapter, Quentin Stevens discusses the value of artificial beaches in urban spaces. Stevens observes how their development could increase gentrification, further alienating and harming local communities and marginalized people.

One worry I had when beginning this book was the potential for it to remain U.S.-centric. While some of the essays focus on local American politics and history, the collection has a global lens, making it relevant to a wider audience. Highlights for me included Nadine Khayat and Clare Rishbeth’s chapter examining three seafronts in Beirut, Katherine T. McCaffrey’s essay on protests over development in Puerto Rico, and Paul Rouse’s examinations of Dollymount Strand and Bull Island in Dublin.

This book shines with essays highlighting ingroup and outgroup tensions and conflicts, as well as its analysis of contradictory narratives surrounding the beach. Use of theoretical language and academic concepts make some parts of this book difficult to parse. I would be interested to see how these stories and ideas could be shared in a more accessible way.

This collection of essays highlights the strong feelings and attachments that beachside communities form. These feelings reveal contrasting concerns and priorities between communities, whether distinguished by class, race, or other identities. On a personal level, this book has given me context on the local beach politics in Latin America and Australia, as well as new language to engage with these topics.

Beach Politics is well-suited to an academic library, as it provides an excellent introduction to the issue of beach access with global case studies for learners and researchers. I recommend this book to anyone interested in exploring how law and governance, protest and community organizing, development and gentrification, and climate change intersect at the ocean’s front.