Presentation short abstract

This presentation discusses territorialization processes in the Elbe estuary, highlighting how regulatory mechanisms shape peripheral agrarian territories and how local contestations emerge as these areas are subordinated to the port’s economic centrality.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines how territorialization unfolds within port regions and their agrarian peripheries, contributing to degrowth debates on re-localization and resistance to extractive relations. While degrowth scholarship emphasizes re-localizing production and consumption to counter imperial dynamics, enable environmental care, and foster autonomy from global capital, little research investigates how these processes operate beyond the hyperlocal scale. Understanding territories as relational constructs shaped through center–periphery power struggles, the paper conceptualizes territorialization as a technology of power that organizes space for resource extraction and future valorization.

Moving beyond existing work that focuses narrowly on local ecological impacts or planetary-scale port urbanization, I develop an inward-looking perspective on regional politics. I argue that regulatory instruments bind agrarian peripheries to the growth imperatives of port economies, even under conditions of stagnation. Through this perspective, Othering emerges as a mechanism that renders certain territories sacrificeable, reinforcing their marginality and constraining alternative territorial visions.

Empirically, the analysis centers on the Hamburg port region and the Elbe estuary. Drawing on fieldwork, semi-structured interviews, archival materials, and regulatory analysis, I identify three intertwined processes of territorialization shaping the estuary’s agrarian peripheries. First, regulatory mechanisms produce future sacrifice zones by capturing peripheral spaces for anticipated valorization, illustrated by developments in the hydrogen economy. Second, decades of Elbe dredging have created zones of environmental cost shifting, transferring ecological burdens onto rural communities through compensation landscapes and sediment disposal. Third, spatial laws and associated participatory procedures consolidate regulatory lock-in, formally including peripheral actors while effectively binding them to port-led growth logics.