Urban Sea

Nikhil Anand | University of Pennsylvania

Abstract

What is the urban sea made of? And how might those working in the urban sea provide new modes and idioms for living in cities with sea level rise? This project provincializes the grounds of urban planning and urban theory by attending to the ways in which fishers living in the city in the sea are already organizing their livelihoods and social worlds with anthropogenic climate change and coastal pollution. Their changing practices may reveal new ways to live in cities in the sea in the future.

Project Note

I am currently writing a book that focuses on the work of fishers, scientists and city planners as they work to understand, inhabit and settle the turbid relationships of the city in the sea. Most of the ethnographic research of Urban Sea was gathered between June 2018 and August 2019. Owing to a series of transportation infrastructure projects being staged in the sea during this time, the relationships between urban government, citizen scientists, fishers, environmental activists, and concerned citizens were (and continue to be) especially fraught.

In the materials presented here, I show how the Urban Sea is a deeply contested, amphibious space. On one hand, the municipal government continues to colonize the edges of the terrestrial city, filling these regions with the profits and prerogatives of real estate. On the other, fishers negotiate the dynamic qualities of the sea even as it is increasingly made of warmer waters, concrete, sewage and more unpredictable ecologies.

The photographs and the two video presentations here stage this tension. The first video presentation dwells in the ongoing histories and processes of land expropriation that make Mumbai at considerable cost to its indigenous fishers and non-human residents. Massive coastal infrastructure projects seek progress by flattening, straightening and drying the city. The second video explores how Koli fishers deploy linear and cyclical spacetimes to reveal fish. Fisheries are the spaces that become and move with the festivals and the tides, with prayers and the sun.

Fish, fishers and fisheries, however, are not outside of the city’s history. They continue to be affected what Amitav Ghosh has called, “the great derangement”– in this case, large-scale landfill and infrastructure modernization projects. This is not a one-way process. Amidst the restive monsoons and seas of climate change, some engineers are increasingly concerned that these massive infrastructures, like fishers and ecologies themselves, can only be as tenuous and impermanent as the urban sea in which they are staged.

Decolonize the Sea

While British colonization ended in 1947, dry land’s colonization of the sea continues to this day. How is colonization of the sea accomplished? And how may it yet be undone?

Credits: Producer- Raka Sen; Assistant Producer- Courtney Daub; Maps- Sara Anand, Photo/ Video Credits- Rupak De Chowdhuri , Rahul Kadri, Bhavesh Mehta, Aaran Patel ,Save Our Coast Mumbai, Atul Yadav. Thanks to Dilip da Cunha, Mojes Koli, Vicky Koli, Anuradha Mathur, Nitesh Patil, Mangesh Sakre, Atul Yadav and Inhabited Sea Friends.