M14 - Cargoes, Bodies, Stories

Author(s)

Gabriel Gee (Franklin University) and Eliana Sousa Santos (Dept. of Architecture at ISCTE in Lisbon.)

Keywords

Port Cities, Urban Transformation, Urban Infrastructure

Abstract

As gateways to their hinterlands, handling the departing and incoming ships sailing on routes to worlds beyond, port cities were key players in the regulation of flows in and out of continental territories. In the European context, the channelling of goods, the expansion of trade and the economic growth that accompanied the opening of long distance sea routes in the 15th and 16th centuries, was paralleled by the development of new modes of representation, landscape and seascapes, the celebration of new narratives in history painting, the building of monuments and architectural structures. Also, the colonial outposts established in the early modern and modern age brought a range of extraneous objects, people, and stories, to the docks of European shores. Presently, representations regarding the shifting identities of European port cities illuminate manifold issues, such as migratory fluxes and crisis.

This session aims to look at the representation of the management of these fluxes within the European port city itself, focussing in particular on goods and trade, on visitors, both professionals and migrants, and on narratives in the writing of history. Furthermore, the celebratory stance of orthodox representations has come under significant critical pressure in the last fifty years. An attention to managing structures and actors in port cities must be complemented by a reflection on past and present depiction of un-controlled maritime circulation, and the socio-political implications they have now and then carried in the shaping of urban, national and European identities.

We reflect on specific modes of representation of port city fluxes from the early modern to the present in phenomena such as, port architectural infrastructure and the regulation of incoming flows (goods, workers, capital), the integration, or rejection, of foreignness and foreigners in harbour cities, narratives of circulation and the appropriation of extraneous stories (visual, literary, historical) and under the radar movements in and out of the port city (smuggling, ‘unchartered’ migration...)

Author(s)

Christoph Strupp (Forschungsstelle für Zeitgeschichte in Hamburg (FZH))

Keywords

Port Cities, Container, Urban Image

Abstract

The 1960s were marked by a sea change in international cargo transportation: Containers revolutionized the shipping of goods, first in the United States, and since 1965 on the Atlantic routes. The first full container ships docked in Rotterdam and Bremen in May 1966 and in Hamburg, Germany's largest seaport, in May 1968. The containers did not only require far-reaching structural changes in the ports, which involved large financial investments. They also threatened to change the function of the ports - and port cities - in international cargo transportation or even to eliminate their established role.

Whereas goods had previously been repackaged and temporarily stored in the ports and their circulation interrupted, it was now possible to set up multimodal chains in which goods were transported from door to door in sealed containers. The direct contact between goods and port workers was lost, cargo remained just briefly in the port area and the ports only served as quick transit stations. The individuality of urban port facilities in the past was now contrasted by the uniformity and interchangeability of the container terminals. For shipowners, short berthing times increased the profitability of their ships, but ports had to perceive this acceleration as a “dangerous threat”, as a trade journal article in 1967 put it.

The proposed presentation will focus, on the one hand, on the debate in Germany on the consequences of the acceleration and rationalization of cargo handling for the economic situation of the seaports. On the other hand, I would like to discuss which consequences this had for the self-image of ports as hinges and hubs in international freight traffic and which strategies they used to respond to the change and defend their position. The focus will be on developments and debates in Hamburg from the 1960s to the 1980s.

Author(s)

Andre Tavares (Lab2PT, Escola de Arquitectura da Universidade do Minho)

Keywords

Fishing, Portugal, Port Cities

Abstract

Cod has become the Portuguese emblematic food. This has happened between the 1920s and 1960s, when the autarkic government engaged on replacing the cod imports by national production. The economic move was entangled with the ideological strategy to inculcate Portugal with the rhetoric of the fifteenth-century discoveries and the celebration of Portuguese sailors bravery. This happened by concentrating the cod fisheries in one specific port in Gafanha da Nazaré, near Aveiro, where the regulatory board surveyed the fishing operations. The development of the cod fishing port reshaped the hierarchy network of the region where it settled, and connected the port to the quest for a unitarian national narrative.

Early cod processing implied open air drying facilities to prepare the catches to trade. These fish flakes had a strong landscape impact and their presence betray the Portuguese archaic fishing and processing methods. Hence, assessing the drying facilities landscape provides an entrance point to the physical transformation entailed by cod fisheries.

The cod was caught in Newfoundland and Greenland, and it implied a long-distance sailing that lasted about six months every year. Two major technological transformations – the introduction of diesel power in fishing ships, allowing the use hauling nets, and the introduction of cooling and freezing systems – reshaped the twentieth century fisheries, changing the trade workforces hierarchies and the related financial systems. Most countries moved on with new fishing cultures, but Portugal did an effort to reinstate the old methods of operation. Such option was connected to a conservative vision of society and was a deliberate option to preserve the social hierarchies. As part of the regime assistance propaganda, a few fishermen’s housing estates were built by the state according to the aesthetics of the Casa Portuguesa, a nationalist construction language associated with strong and specific moral values. Cod was the food counterpart of the nationalist architectural style.

This paper aims to present the physical development of Gafanha’s cod-fishing port in relation to food as the representation of national identity. It argues that there is an uncanny relation between social imagery and its physical counterpart.

Author(s)

Brigitte Lenormand (the University of British Colombia) and Sarah Lemmen (universidade Complutense Madrid)

Keywords

Port Cities, Socialism, Maritime Networks

Abstract

In a recent article with Sarah Lemmen on the socialist port – or, more specifically, the port in state socialism, as a type, we explore the apparent contradiction during the Cold War between the desire of Europe’s socialist states to limit contact with the liberal and capitalist West, and, on the other hand, their need to participate in international maritime trade. These contradictions created tensions, for example Communist states’ desire to maintain control over the movements, contacts, and exchanges of their citizens, and these citizens’ efforts to escape this control, through conspicuous consumption, smuggling, and defection. In this presentation, using the case study of the port of Rijeka, in socialist Yugoslavia, I will focus on the other side of the story – Yugoslavia’s energetic embracing of global maritime trade as an essential component of its globalization strategy, and its consequences for the city.

To become a player in global goods transportation, Yugoslavia invested substantially in both fixed (port) and mobile (merchant marine) infrastructure. On the one hand, looking backwards, Yugoslavia built on infrastructural legacies from the Habsburg era. Rijeka imaginatively reframed its inherited infrastructure to position itself as “Central Europe’s gateway to the World.” On the other hand, looking forwards, Yugoslavia leveraged its emerging strategy of building horizontal ties with Global South states (best known through the non-aligned movement) by ambitiously promoting the development of shipping lines spanning the globe. Finally, I consider how these flows (and more specifically, Rijeka’s strategic role as Yugoslavia’s main port) shaped the city and the region’s development.

Through this intervention, I consider to what extent this made Rijeka a global city – not the kind of global city or world city described by Saskia Sassen and others; that is, a city integrated into an elite network of financial capitals. Rather, I argue that Rijeka, like many other port cities, particularly in the decolonizing world, staked a claim to participate on its own terms in the emerging decolonizing globalized world order by becoming a maritime transportation actor. Moreover, the fast-paced development and prioritization of port activities did have important implications for the city, manifesting itself in the prioritization of the needs of the port over those of the inhabitants.

Author(s)

Caroline Wiedmer (Franklin University) 

Keywords

Port Cities, Migration, Securization

Abstract

One of the critical narrative moments in recent documentary depiction of the so-called refugee crisis of 2014/2015 in Europe is the moment a person steps off the boat and onto European soil. It is a moment both of triumph and entrapment, denoting on the one hand the survival of what are often treacherous, even deadly journeys across the Mediterranean, and on the other the way bodies are fingerprinted, digitalized, and registered in EURODAC, the Europe-wide security and surveillance system that has settled over the European continent like an invisible net. Thus enveloped in this comprehensive system, which has, Sarah Léonard and Christian Kaunert argue, constructed links among asylum seekers, irregular migrants, and terrorists in the wake of several terrorist attacks in Europe, irregular migrants see their access to European asylum systems hindered (Léonard and Kaunert, 2019).

This paper investigates visual and narrative representations of the encounters between human beings and the social and technological mechanisms of securitization in European port cities over the last decade. On the one hand, it will pay special attention to some of the institutional stakeholders identified by Salvatore Vitale in his installation How to Secure a Country: the customs and migration authorities, police, IT companies, and research institutions for robotics and artificial intelligence (Vitale 2019); on the other it asks after the effect the system has on the asylum chances of those passing through the system, and on the ability of narrative to grasp the extent and import of securitization across Europe.