Urban Coastal Communities: Lives, Livelihoods, and Local Knowledge in the Anthropocene

Tuesday, 8 July 2025: 15:00-16:45
Location: ASJE016 (Annex of the Faculty of Legal, Economic, and Social Sciences)
RC21 Regional and Urban Development (host committee)

Language: English

Urban sociologists, planners, and geographers have theorised the urban-rural interface as a key operational landscape and site of settlement activity. However, the urban-ocean interface requires equally engaged examination, particularly in the context of climate change. History and archaeology have established strong links between human settlements and water. With industrialisation and globalisation, ports were functionally separated from cities, opening up other urban-ocean priorities, including economic revitalisation, waterfront (re)development, and tourism. Yet, many of the urban communities whose lives and livelihood were situated in historical urban waterfronts have remained. Urban coastal communities, defined by Ivan Pistone (2024) as those “intimately connected to the coast and the sea, as the urban area of first interaction between settlements and the sea, and to the coastal water,” are essential to “ecological transition processes” as they experience the most direct impacts of rising sea levels and changing coastal ecologies. These communities include those whose work is associated with the economic exploitation of the coastal commons, such as fisher communities and related fishing supply-chain workers, small-scale manufacturing industries, water-based transport, and shipbuilding, repair, and breaking, among others. In this Anthropocene, these communities’ lives, knowledge, and connection to the sea are relevant to global climate change and social justice debates for marginalised communities. We invite papers that center urban coastal communities and reflect on how best to include their voices in a wider debate on climate change and urban and, particularly, marine spatial planning.
Session Organizer:
Liza WEINSTEIN, Northeastern University, USA
Oral Presentations
The Canary in the Coal Mine: Understanding Climate Change through the Indigenous Language of Sea Attacks in Kochi’s Urban Fisher Communities
Kimberly NORONHA, University of Pennsylvania, USA
Fisherpoets: Confronting Climate Crisis through Art and Work
Allison WIGEN, USA
Climate Change Adaptation and Coping Mechanisms of Coastal Communities in Semarang, Indonesia
Sonia ROITMAN, The University of Queensland, Australia; Idha APRILIANI, Universitas Diponegoro, Indonesia
Redefining the Relation between the City and the Sea: Tensions and Conflicts in the Transformation of Barcelona’s Coastal Neighbourhoods
Marc PRADEL MIQUEL, Universitat de Barcelona, Spain
Cities at Sea: Environmentalizing Colonial Continuities in Urban Sociology
Kalyani MONTEIRO JAYASANKAR, USA
Climate Change and Ordinary Cities: A Comparative Analysis of Climate Change and Livelihoods in Mediterranean and Indian Coastal Communities.
Pinelopi VERGOU, University of Thessaly, Greece; Ratoola KUNDU, Centre for Urban Policy and Governance, TISS, Mumbai, India, India
Intersections between Traditionality, Territoriality and Reterritorialization in Urban Fishing Communities: A Study of the Bode Community (Recife - Brazil)
Célio Henrique ROCHA MOURA, Brazil
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