Cities at Sea: Environmentalizing Colonial Continuities in Urban Sociology

Coastal cities have historically been major nodes in the world economy, serving as ports, markets, and sites of production and administration, through which labor, capital, and ideas flow (Boschken 2013; Dawson 2017). These cities were often built through environmental interventions that sought to harden the boundaries between land and water. As the effects of climate change become more apparent, these boundaries are beginning to rupture. In this article, I argue that the environment provides an opportunity to theorize colonial continuities, or the legacies and continuing role of colonial genocide, displacement, and extraction that are inscribed in the visions that have informed the growth of many coastal cities, the policies they have enabled, and the exclusions they have engendered. Drawing on archival research and ethnographic fieldwork in Mumbai and Miami with residents and local government representatives, I examine how both cities emerged through extensive environmental interventions that involved a colonizing vision of nature that have contributed to making these cities increasingly flood prone. Scholars note that colonial occupation of land is premised on the “ideology of improvement,” that defines a correct use for land and those who can rightfully possess it (Bhandar 2018:39). While demonstrating that the environment provides an opportunity to investigate colonial continuities in urban spaces, I argue that colonialism is premised on a dual process of claims-making and displacement. In the context of the environment, this involves laying claim to land from uses that do not serve colonial interests and turning it towards uses that do, accompanied by attempts to displace and dispossess Indigenous people. By focusing on the imagined relationships between the city and nature (sea, swamp, scrub, desert, or forest), I show that sociologists can critically examine the operation of colonialism in contemporary urban contexts (Angelo 2017).