Registration: L.Kopitz@uva.nl

How do fishers and scientists read the uncertain terrain of the city in the sea? What stories does the urban sea tell about the ongoing futures of the city? I begin this talk by examining how fishers in Mumbai read the seas in their everyday work. By orienting their livelihoods around the arts of noticing sea colour, wind, tide and time, fishers generate a sea of fish in an uncertain waterscape. Next, I focus on the work of scientists that eagerly walk and work the city’s urban seas to apprehend the movement of contaminants, marine life climate warmed currents and cyclones.  Where citizen scientists working in intertidal regions orient their research around tides and waste, oceanographers working with remote sensing images see the climate crisis in ongoing algal blooms, rising seas and eutrophication events that occur at different temporal and spatial scales. Dwelling in the ways that fishers and scientists read the urban sea, I argue that the ongoing rhythms of coastal pollution, infrastructure construction, and colonial property-making constitute the climate of the urban sea in Mumbai; a climate that continues to be made by the colonial expropriation of lifeworlds through the relentless making of property and real estate in the city. 

Nikhil Anand is Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania. Anand’s research focuses on the political ecology of cities, read through the different lives of water. His first book, Hydraulic City (Duke University Press, 2017), focuses on the everyday ways in which cities and citizens are made through the everyday management of water infrastructure in Mumbai. His interest in infrastructure led to the co-edited volume The Promise of Infrastructure (Duke University Press, 2018), and his new book project, The Urban Sea, conducts field research with fishers, scientists and planners as they work in the sea, drawing attention to the ways in which climate-changed seas are remaking coastal cities today. 

For more information about the “More-than-Human Cities” seminar, organised by Carolyn Birdsall, Riley Gold and Linda Kopitz, see www.cities.humanities.uva.nl