The urban sea: a conceptual reimagination of coastal materiality

Keywords: urban, coastal, labour, fishing
Session Type: Virtual Paper
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 4/11/2021 09:35 AM (Pacific Time (US & Canada)) - 4/11/2021 10:50 AM (Pacific Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 21

Abstract

Urban research has paid curiously scant attention to seashores and their role in urbanisation trajectories, despite historical continuities in coastal development. In the city of Chennai in south India, the seashore has long been pivotal to development activity, with industrial, infrastructural and leisure economies converging on the coastline. Governmentalities of ecological vulnerability have only fed into attempts at beautification and redevelopment of a hitherto multifariously inhabited shoreline.
In this context, this paper focuses its attention on the labour that makes the sea and the sands along its shore urban ie., primarily the artisanal fishers who live along the shoreline and practise their craft, as livelihood or supplemental occupation. As a caste of traditional craftspeople, the work and life of fishers is frequently thought of as incompatible with the city.
By engaging with the rich variety of fisher practices that mediate between land, water, salt and urban life in Chennai, this paper contends that it is critical to consider seawater as already urban rather than as urbanised by contemporary global development. In exploring the spatialisation of fishers’ labour in the sea, it attempts to broaden the conceptualisation of the urban beyond the terrestrial. This conceptual reimagination can then allow us to examine material and spatial claims to the sea as claims towards the right to the city.