Urban oceans: Social differentiation in the city and the sea

Abstract

This paper argues that the urban and the ocean are co-constituted through relations that are unevenly classed, gendered, and racialized. This argument is empirically anchored in high-value fish maw markets in Hong Kong, New York City, and the oceanic spaces and lives therein. The global inter-urban trade in Totoaba, an endangered fish endemic to the Gulf of California, serves as a primary example of piscine capital circulation, while supporting examples engage a much longer durée of urban ocean relations. Agrarian technologies appropriated through colonial trans-oceanic trade, for instance, are shown to be precursors of Euro-American industrial urbanization, while whale bodies were crucial to urban politics of difference and producing urban spaces in 19th century U.S. cities. Contemporary fisheries on the high seas exemplify how ocean spaces remain frontiers of unfree labor and natural resource extraction that contribute to capital accumulation in global cities. Through these examples, the article details how the ocean is urbanized, how the urban is constituted through the ocean, as well as some of the differentiated social formations and socio-natural effects of urban oceanic relationships. Urban oceanic processes of exploitation, extraction, circulation, and consumption predispose marginalized people and ocean wildlife to premature deaths. Urban oceanic relations could be otherwise constituted. Towards reconstituting these relations, the paper advances a hybrid analytical framework that ungrounds the urban from terrestrial conceptual moorings through engaging interdisciplinary ocean geographies.

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