Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper examines a case study on cruise ship pollution in northern Marseille. It shows that while citizen sensing helps document environmental pollution, alliances with social movements are crucial to bring it onto the public agenda and to question adopted techno-solutions.

Paper long abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the cruise industry suddenly suspended its operations worldwide, making the port of Marseille one of the key Mediterranean harbours for repatriating cruise passengers. While most ships made only a quick stop at the cruise terminals located in the northern districts of Marseille, some stayed for extended periods. At one point, fourteen cruise ships were moored there, adding to the pre-existing social and environmental violence in this area. Once moored, the ships’ engines are connected to heavy fuel oil generators that operate 24 hours a day to supply the ships with power and maintain onboard operations.

As the number of cruise ships docked in the port increased, concerns over air pollution grew among residents and environmental activists from Extinction Rebellion and Alternatiba. They quickly began monitoring air quality in their neighbourhoods using PurpleAir sensors. Based on thirty-three semi-structured interviews and observational fieldwork, this paper examines how citizen sensing (Gabrys, 2022) and social movements (Ottinger, 2016) function as complementary mechanisms that document pollution problems and make them visible in the public arena. It argues that alliances between residents and the “Stop Cruises” social movement were crucial in bringing the environmental violence (Bécot and Le Naour, 2023) onto the public agenda and in questioning the techno-solutions implemented within environmental transition politics, such as shore-power connections for ships or scrubbers (ship exhaust gas cleaning devices). This paper suggests that these solutions only partially address pollution problems and tend to displace and transform environmental health outcomes without challenging industrial capitalism.