Sediment Commons: The Edibility Order 2046 Part 2 Dissertation 2026 Caius Sharpe Royal College of Art | UK The Fal Estuary in Cornwall is governed as a water catchment boundary, port, and fishery, assuming in the latter that the last wild European oyster fishery under sail and oar accommodates edible Fal Oysters. Currently governed through licences, boundary lines, and regulatory data, ‘The Sediment Commons: Edibility Order 2046’ argues that legal instruments have failed to protect the estuary, understood as a shared culture of nourishment, labour, and kinship, and proposes an alternative epistemology of territory grounded in the body metabolising the landscape.This dissertation is developed as a piece of speculative legislation, with ‘The Edibility Order 2046’, granting a formal commons right of access to the Fal Estuary as an edible territory, reconstituted through the Fal oyster. Critically, the Order asserts eating as a mode of governance, rather than monitoring the estuary through external classification. Common right holders verify the estuary’s condition through gustatory intimacy, with operators performing a public act of consumption called ‘Standing Assurance’ as an instrument of accountability.Treating the legal proposition as an architectural framework, the Sediment Commons is conceived as a representative inhabitation of the Order’s articles and non-representationally as a space that manifests its ambitions directly as new compositions of spatial, physiological, and cultural intimacies.Methodologically, the project combines statutory writing, design, situated fieldwork, and testimony from informal archives of the intergenerational Fal oyster fishermen. By traversing architecture, policy, and eating, the thesis positions the edibility order as legislation grounded in the body metabolising the Fal Estuary. Tutor(s) Emerald Wise