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Paper short abstract:

COSCO's new masterplan for the future of the Port of Piraeus raises local fears of 'Chinafication,' stirring environmental and economic concerns .However, ethnographic research uncovers the active involvement of pre-COSCO local and global agents that lead to today's visions for the future.

Paper long abstract:

Piraeus, Greece's largest port, has become a vital component in China's infrastructural expansion strategy—the "Belt and Road Initiative." Amidst a complex conjuncture involving stakeholders such as the European Union, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund "troika," which enforced extensive privatization projects during Greece's financial crisis, and China's long-term goal of bridging infrastructural gaps along maritime trade routes, the port underwent gradual privatization, eventually being sold to Chinese interests . This transformation positioned Piraeus as a globally competitive container port.

Following its acquisition by COSCO, the Chinese shipping company, a new masterplan was devised and published. This plan not only committed to investments in the container sector but also aimed to elevate the tourist potential of Piraeus through funding for cruise terminals and real estate within the port's boundaries, including hotels and casinos. For local radical voices and social movements, this strategic move signifies a perceived neo-colonial agenda, anticipating the "Chinafication" of Piraeus, marked by port expansion through land reclamation, escalating environmental degradation, and the commodification of the city without substantial benefits flowing to the local market.

However, ethnographic research uncovers a more intricate narrative. This paper illustrates how the existing masterplan has been shaped and reshaped through speculations, strategies, and interests that were already in motion long before the concession to COSCO. Contrary to being a meticulously planned strategy dictated solely by Chinese capital, the masterplan encapsulates strategies and imaginaries about the future of Piraeus originating from local real estate capital, the EU, left-wing organizations, and, eventually, COSCO.

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Sri Lanka's infrastructure boom, backed by Chinese loans for financial hub ambitions, halted with bankruptcy. This paper examines if such projects serve nationalist goals, affecting socio-political dynamics, and raises concerns about Chinese influence in Sri Lanka and the Indian Ocean.

Paper long abstract:

Until Sri Lanka declared bankruptcy, it was in the midst of an uneven and contested infrastructure boom with investment directed into roads, ports, and airports funded by Chinese loans driven by its ambitions to become a ‘world-class’ financial trading hub in South Asia. These projects were promoted by successive governments as the panacea for a politically and economically fractured Sri Lanka after a three-decade civil war. The latest and biggest project in the country to date is the Colombo Port City project, which involves reclaiming 269ha land from the Indian Ocean. Responding to the call for a more grounded understanding of mega-infrastructure projects (Ruwanpura, Rowe, and Chan, 2020), this paper will first examine how China-backed mega-development projects like the Port City are built and will focus on who plans and manages these projects. Conceptualising the Colombo Port City Economic Commission as powerful elite brokers, and building on ethnographic work and interviews, I ask if these projects are merely about ‘asserting power of a triumphalist nationalist project’ (Venugopal, 2018), or if they will only further open up ‘up ‘new spaces for violence and political manipulation’ (Winslow and Woost, 2004). The paper concludes by asking who this development and reimagined post-war Sri Lanka is for, and if these projects which open up the newest frontier of the ocean are conduits through which Chinese sovereignty can be asserted in Sri Lanka, and in the Indian Ocean.

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The Hudson River Waterfront of New York, colloquially known as the “Piers”, emerged as a queer subcultural space in the 1960s and 70s, when the abandoned, deteriorating pier sheds became sites for gathering, sex work, art, and cruising. With the creation of the Hudson River Park in the late 90s – a heteronormative architecture of policing, surveillance, and dispossession –, the Piers and the adjacent neighborhood were rapidly gentrified. Recently, there has been a proliferation in cultural memory of the Piers in art spaces, the academy, cultural institutions, and queer communities alike. In 2020, the Whitney Museum dedicated the $18 million sculpture Day’s End by artist David Hammons, a thin steel structure that re-traces the outlines of one of the pier buildings and memorializes the Waterfront’s past. Drawing on archival research and interviews with curators, artists, and community members, this paper traces the renewed interest in the queer archive of the waterfront and investigates the simultaneity of memorialization and dispossession considering questions of queer space, architecture, and temporality. The emergent cultural memory of the Piers often relies on accounts and visual records that locate gay pre-AIDS sexual possibility in crumbling ruins, producing an (architectural) imaginary of sexual revolution that simplifies, transfigures, and erases parts of its history. In examining the Waterfront’s queer history alongside how the site is being remembered, this paper seeks to complicate nostalgic longings for the Pier’s past and to understand the politics, desires, and temporalities underpinning memories and historiographies of the Piers.

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Paper short abstract:

Based on fieldwork with environmentalists in Lebanon working to protect coastal nature and challenge capital-driven enclosure, this paper examines how environmental futures in the making are fraught with uncertainty yet herald possibilities for political imagination.

Paper long abstract:

Coastal processes of real estate speculation have emerged as central to Lebanon’s real-neoliberal model, which has been so bereft of regulation that it has been described as laissez-tout-faire. The country's coastline has witnessed successive waves of enclosure of coastal areas in the 21st and 22nd centuries. These processes have historical roots in colonialism under the French mandate, and until the 2010’s they have often been uneasy, afforded by gray areas of law and proceeding by exception. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with environmentalists on the Lebanese littoral, this paper asks: why have environmental groups that describe themselves as non-political taken to campaign on issues of urban and public space? What kinds of futures are they crafting through both practices of environmental conservation and contesting coastal real estate development? Against the background of landfilling and development that suture the country's ailing sectarian neoliberalism, this paper focuses on coastal environmentalism as a speculative endeavor. I look at this tense coastal (non)politics through an ethnographic analysis of discordant debates around a public beach in the Lebanese capital Beirut. In the 2000’s conjuncture of social movements and political economy, environmentalists have emerged as prime protagonists in challenging the prevailing mode of governance of the country’s coastline. I argue that such environmentalist futures in the making are fraught with uncertainty yet herald possibilities for political imagination.

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Paper short abstract:

Based on fieldwork involving job-shadowing shore-based professionals who visit ships in Hamburg’s port terminals, this paper examines how these visitors navigate the material and legal enclaves of waterfronts at the shifting interface between the overseas, logistical supply chains and urban shores.

Paper long abstract:

While the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea clearly affirms the right of ‘innocent passage’ through territorial waters, ocean-going commercial ships are far from being granted automatic access to port facilities. What forms of legal, material and political speculation underpin the regulation of access to the waterfronts of Hamburg? The foreign-flagged vessels at berth have extra-territorial status that restricts the jurisdiction of German authorities on board. Additionally, given the colossal dimensions of the newest Neo-Panamax vessels, accommodating them entails constant infrastructural renovations such as ever-deeper dredging and dyke reinforcement along the Elbe River and wharf maintenance in port terminals located on former tidal marshes. Yet most commodities originate from (or are headed) overseas, and making sure they cross national sea boundaries smoothly is a vital issue for sovereign states. While the logistical revolution of containerization has led to huge modifications of port environments, it has also undermined conditions of work in ports and aboard vessels. A number of shore-based professionals from port authorities, state agencies, and private corporations regularly visit seafarers in order to facilitate port calls and maintain the paperwork on board. They know the port of Hamburg intimately. By describing the physical and bureaucratic hurdles that they experience when circulating around the harbour to the ships, I examine the speculative futures of cities by the sea. Based on my fieldwork with ship visitors, this paper is an exploration of enclave capitalism in its current material waterfront manifestation.

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Paper short abstract:

Cities like Dar es Salaam are crucibles for a heterogeneous crowd of unformed potential where urban futures can arrive from any quarter, bridge, or beach. Exploring financial relations from an urban beach elucidates the eternal return of the tide and the potentialities its movements provide.

Paper long abstract:

In 2016, Tanzania’s (late) president inaugurated a giant cable-stayed bridge in Dar es Salaam's harbour with the promise that “the bridge will build the economy”, an important step towards the “New Tanzania” materialised through the urban interface.

Yet, the bridge’s “economy” was located at an Olympian remove from the activities taking place beneath the bridge, at the beach. Leading towards a future of state-funded development promises, the bridge concealed a parallel rhythm: the tidal temporality of the lives lived in a neighbourhood known as Minazini Beach. Between ebb and flow the residents carved out an existence gathering remnants the tide brought to earn their livelihoods.

In Swahili, the nouns uchumi (“economy”) and chuma (“earning”) derive from the same verb; kuchuma. Like uchumi, kuchuma has multiple meanings that blend into each other. Kuchuma is used to describe the multiplicity of activities relating to the popular economies, including “to gather”, “to collect”, and “to earn”. The clue is in the grammar: uchumi and chuma are both instantiations of kuchuma, which complicate perceptions of what makes up "formal" and "informal" speculations.

Rending visible the beach’s affordances I aim to provisionally “gather” (Strathern 2017) a set of actions and qualities of Minazini Beach that elucidates the eternal return of the tide and the potentialities its movements provide. Understanding the beach as foundational of life and the economic activities that makes up life, I argue that the future of the beach becomes urgent to every location eclipsed by similar tidal conditions across the majority world.

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The urban wetland Ciénaga de la Virgen is ground for extensive speculation in the port- and tourist city of Cartagena, Colombia. In particular, its mangroves are considered as ‘green gold’ providing insights into the contested futures of urban planning and belonging in this urban intertidal zone.

Paper long abstract:

Cartagena, a coastal city in Colombia, historically served as one of the major ports for the Spanish conquest of the Latin American continent, shipping enslaved Africans in and gold out. Today, the significantly diminished mangrove forest along the Ciénaga de la Virgen is Cartagena’s most treasured yet contested resource for combating rising sea levels, preventing erosion, and mitigating the consequences of urban climate change.

As a result, mangroves have transformed into “green gold” (oro verde), a neoliberal commodity associated with progress and economic development, in addition to their value in addressing the effects of climate change in this coastal city. Mangroves promise to become a new extractive industry, with a potential future trade of carbon capture and storage (CCS), while also contributing to Cartagena’s tourism portfolio through ecotourism. Consequently, the urban wetland and its mangroves become grounds for extensive speculation in Cartagena.

A local community leader reflects: “When the elites fill up the wetland, then it’s called ‘urban development’; when the poor fill up the wetland, it’s called ‘invasion’” (field notes, January 2023). Drawing on approaches from political ecology and critical urban theory, this case study addresses mangroves as part of widespread waterfront speculation, examining perspectives from both urban elites and local communities. It illuminates the tensions and manifold layers involved in the making and unmaking of urban space between land and water, exploring the nexus of prognostic urban politics, the interests involved in ‘green gentrification,’ and urban belonging in Cartagena’s intertidal zones.

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This paper analyses the role of granular matter in the (un)making of the coastal commons in Goa. Through an inquiry into forms of embankment and infrastructural projects, it couples an approach to practices of commoning with an attention to shifty material process on a rapidly urbanising shorefront.

Paper long abstract:

Recent influx of capital to Goa as a sprawling site for “second-homes”, work-from-home destination and tourism centre, poses many socio-ecological risks to the rapidly urbanising shorelines. Based on initial phase of ethnographic fieldwork, this paper examines how sand materialises access rights to valued ecosystems in the context of territorial projects such as river embankments and mobility infrastructure. I examine Goa’s khazan lands — marshy spaces reclaimed from the sea to increase the surface of cultivable land — as “traditional” engineered artefacts which hold tidal waters out. While these systems are on the decline due to private land acquisitions or pseudo-legal forms of changing land categories, they are crucial to understanding colonial demarcations of space and future capacities of commoning.  

In this paper, I bring attention to shifty granular material processes which can unsettle boundaries of common pool resources that straddle realms of public and private; land and sea. Through interviews with geologists, coastal engineers and architects, I analyse the tension between practices of managing coastal commons, valuation of ecosystems and material properties. I argue that this analytical tension allows for conceptualising beyond a polarisation of private property and state intervention (Harvey, 2009:68) and takes seriously the notion of social practice which dictate regimes of access. Goa’s vibrant history of environmental activism and advocacy for land and resource use for all, continues to guide the scope of coastal transformation. Ethnographic attention to smaller acts of land reclamation and the use of khazan lands, can help grapple with its ever-shifting urban waterfronts.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper engages with the speculative acquisition of subsiding and submerged coastal spaces in Semarang, Indonesia. Ethnographically following the reciprocal anticipations in which fishpond ruination is enmeshed, I interrogate the possibility of land-making through capitalist reclamation.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines Semarang’s particular instance of waterfront speculation, in which what is speculated is not only a fluctuation in land prices, but also the very possibility of land-making.

Marshy coastal landscapes around Semarang are neither fully liquid nor solid. It is a waterscape fertile precisely because of fishponds that blur distinctions between land and ocean, freshwater, and saltwater. Despite being increasingly polluted and submerged because of the combined impacts of pollutants, coastal erosion, and subsidence, the price of fishponds is increasing fast.

In this paper, I draw on descriptions of “environmental speculation” (Colven, 2022) - the process in which the expected ruination of coastal ecologies and livelihoods opens ways to capitalist capture driven by industrial and state projects - to better understand this speculative coastal urbanization.

Following Cortesi’s definition of land as “an economic expectation, based on the presumption of stability” (2022:217), this paper attends to the more-than-human speculative labor of conjuring and assembling (Li, 2014) land in the westernmost area of Semarang.

It first traces historical continuities in projects of ponds stabilization infused with concerns for securing Semarang’s surrounds. Second, it turns to the alliance that allows a local real estate developer to systematically acquire fishponds. This precarious assemblage brings together knowledgeable local brokers, crossed anticipations, depleted aquifers, incentives for land certification, long-tendered influence on selected public agencies, the project of a giant seawall, and, on some occasions, violence. The paper concludes with a reflection on the persistent incompleteness of land-making projects in coastal Semarang.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper addresses struggles between commercial fishing interests and state-led environmental protection measures in the context of coastal development across the U.S. Gulf Coast, and discusses scientific expertise as a form of speculative labor in state-led coastal development strategies.

Paper long abstract:

This paper addresses the tensions and struggles emerging between commercial fishing interests and state-led environmental protection measures in the context of coastal development across the U.S. Gulf Coast.

Since the 1970s, as state-led efforts in developing markets for coastal tourism organized around recreational fishing intensified across the U.S. Gulf coast states, narratives of resource scarcity and questions of environmental protection have animated conflicts between the region’s commercial fisheries, state agencies, and overlapping interests in conservation organizations and the recreational fisheries.

Drawing on historical and ethnographic research among commercial fisherfolk in Louisiana, this paper hones in on central moments of transformation in fishery legislation in the Gulf coast fisheries. In doing so, it posits fishery legislation as an arena in which contestations over livelihood, environmental protection, and coastal economic development strategies intersect. More specifically, the paper discusses the mobilization of scientific expertise as part and parcel of a wider unfolding of coastal transformation, and as a form of speculative labor, which in this context has been integral in legitimizing and facilitating transformations in the coastal landscape and the livelihoods it sustains.