Infrastructure, Spatial Imaginaries and Dispossession: Narratives of Port-City Making
基于印度喀拉拉邦维津詹姆国际港的民族志研究，探讨港口建设如何通过空间想象和利益争夺，剥夺小规模渔业工人的资源与生计，揭示港口城市营造中的不公正。
Port-city making within the larger urban expansion discourse has become a defining feature of contemporary development along India’s coasts. The Vizhinjam International Seaport in Kerala exemplifies how infrastructure reconfigures coastal space and ruptures scales, producing dispossession within frontiers. The port infrastructure and its entanglements with stakeholders’ spatial imaginaries produce these complexities within the frontiers, as we explore in this paper. The construction of the port has disrupted the existing system of access and control over resource, traditional livelihood practices, and introduced new forms of exclusion. Among the most affected are small-scale fish workers who depend on coastal land and resources. State-capital forces have facilitated dispossession by legitimising certain claims while neglecting and rendering invisible those of the marginalised. This paper, based on an ethnographic study, engages with discussions involving multiple stakeholders of the port project, particularly the small-scale fish workers. By juxtaposing state documents, VISL documents, and observations and testimonies from the field with wider critiques of frontiers characterised by the spatial imaginaries of stakeholders, the research demonstrates how port-city making perpetuates injustices through dispossession and displacement. It argues that the newly emerged frontiers must be understood in terms of not only economic growth but also affective experiences of stakeholders.