Infrastructural extraterritoriality on the waterfront: jurisdiction at the Port of New York, 1857–1921

ABSTRACT

Between 1857 and 1921, the Port of New York’s waterfront infrastructure was the target of jurisdictional extraterritorialisation that would remove its control from local hands within the nation state. I present a case study of this process to understand how infrastructural extraterritoriality functions as a state response to the central tension of infrastructure: fixity and flow. This tension is characterised by the need to ensure the material embeddedness in the everyday life of cities of the Port of New York’s piers, wharves and slips, and the scale-jumping connectivity required to ensure the global networks of trade and transportation function appropriately. In this paper, I examine a case study of the Port of New York’s efforts to re-territorialise jurisdiction over waterfront infrastructure as attempts to resolve this tension. I demonstrate how not only is this tension on-going, but that it requires the sort of extraterritorial governance that has become commonplace over infrastructure today.

KEYWORDS:

• Infrastructure
• legal geography
• scale
• ports
• New York City

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the editors of this special issue, Zachary Androus, Magda Stawkowski and Robert Kopack for their invitation to participate and their thoughtful comments on a previous version of this paper. Thanks as well to Killian McCormack, Robert Lewis, Paul Hess, Raj Reddy and Matt Farish, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship.

Notes on contributors

Nick Lombardo

Nick Lombardo is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto. His research deals with the intersection between infrastructure, law, property and regional governance and planning. His current research project explores municipal and regional planning responses to large-scale Canadian federal infrastructure projects.