Between Sea and City: Ethnographic explorations of infrastructure, work, and place around leading urban container ports

Project Information

Ports

Grant agreement ID: 851132

DOI

10.3030/851132

Project closed

EC signature date 23 January 2020

Start date 1 February 2020

End date 31 March 2025

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 499 950,00

EU contribution

€ 1 499 950,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITETET I OSLO
Norway

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - Ports (Between Sea and City: Ethnographic explorations of infrastructure, work, and place around leading urban container ports)

Reporting period: 2024-08-01 to 2025-03-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The ERC-funded project Ports explores how global capitalism plays out in five maritime cities (Rotterdam, Piraeus, Singapore, Hamburg, and Pusan) that are big in container handling. Nearly all the commodities we surround ourselves with come to us, often from distant locations, via ship. Most of the goods we buy nowadays are manufactured in Asia, and by extension, many of the busiest container ports are located in that part of the world too. Europe is increasingly playing a more marginal role here: Rotterdam, for instance, our continent’s most important port, is only the 13th largest port in the world.
In times of global supply chain uncertainties, geopolitical tensions, and the growing climate crisis, ports are key nodes that may allow us to better understand the functioning of the world economy today. In particular, they allow unique insights into the multifaceted impact that gravitational shifts from the West to the East have on urban spaces nearby major ports today. Deploying ethnographic fieldwork as its main comparative research tool, the project studies work transformations, the impact of infrastructural and technological changes in the maritime sector, and the at times conflict-riddled nexus between globally significant cities and the ports that they host.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The project was launched against the global backdrop of an escalating set of crises that were also centrally played out inside the main object of the study. In addition to causing significant longer-term disruptions at ports, the Covid19-pandemic also meant that our opportunities to conduct research around on these topics was massively impacted. In February 2021, Norway closed its international borders down, making all cross-border travel nearly impossible for those who were not residents in the country already until autumn 2021. Therefore, for the greater part of 2021 the Ports-team stayed scattered across various locations in the world, with the group jumpstarting its collaboration on digital platforms. An internal kick-off event was only held at University of Oslo in Sept. 2021, where all participants managed to get together and present their plans, working out first commonalities and resonances between the different sub-projects. In 2022, the group members then commenced fieldwork.

In addition to disruptions caused by Covid-19, the Suez Canal obstruction, the War on Ukraine, and now the energy crisis have all been emerging topics that have fundamentally affected ports worldwide. To address some of these challenges in a timely fashion, Elisabeth Schober, together with Hege Leivestad, published a paper in “Anthropology Today” in June 2021. It takes the Suez Canal incident as a starting point to reflect on the spectacular growth of container ships, and the hidden costs this development has had on ports. Schober and Leivestad also edited a series of short essays on the same topic, which came out as a Forum in the journal “History and Anthropology” in April 2022. This issue brings together eminent maritime anthropologists who engage with our modern-day dependencies on the just-in-time delivery model that the technologies of logistics have enabled.

Logistics, too, was the key term at a panel the group organized at the European Association for Social Anthropologists-biannual meeting (EASA2022). At this panel on “Logistical Transformations. Supply Chains and the Politics of Circulations” the focus was on how the global pandemic has come to highlight the fragility and volatility of supply chains: seafarers stranded at sea, delayed shipping containers, empty store shelves, shortages of truck drivers, energy issues at production centers, and a boom of door-to-door deliveries handled by exploited workers were some of the issues touched upon.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The stated goal of the PORTS-project is to both investigate concrete city-vs.-port systems and the place of labor in it, as well as provide an analysis of shifting large-scale dynamics in containerized ocean transportation. Through ethnographic work, much progress has been made on collecting data on the city-vs.-port and labor angle – but where the project certainly goes beyond the state of the art is in the third aspect mentioned here. Before the project commenced, there was no way of knowing that the project period would coincide with the occurrence of a series of nestled crises to do with logistics, supply chains, and ports as key nodes in these systems. In addition to proving challenging to the actual research work, these events have also provided a great opportunity in the sense that the research group is able to track, “in real time”, how the just-in-time model that the global economic system fundamentally depends upon is coming under much pressure in various locations. The reassessment of the old model of globalization that containerized shipping has played a central role in is an ongoing process that the project members have been able to trace in various contexts across Europe and Asia – these findings will centrally contribute to shaping our understandings around how global supply chains come to touch upon and engage with concrete socio-cultural conditions, different labour histories, and infrastructures.

PORTS opening workshop