Folded ocean: The spatial transformation of the Indian Ocean world

Abstract

This paper presents experimental research on the Indian Ocean being undertaken within the context of what has been termed architecture's contemporary geographic turn. It investigates how oceanic practices and protocols fold into spatial and architectural products on land, figuring both sea- and land-based logics. It frames this ocean through three tropes: as contact zone, with which are associated ideas of creolisation, transnationalism, entanglement, compaction and multi-polarity; as circulator with which are associated ideas of connectivity, passage, lane, route, choke point, network, port, dock and deposit; and as ecology, with which are associated ideas of liquidity, cycle, rhythm and climate change. The paper introduces these tropes and investigates sites brought into focus through them, highlighting the wider global dynamics or processes they reveal. It concludes with provisional thoughts about what these amphibious sites offer for understandings of architecture and urbanism in today's hyper-articulated, globalised world.

Keywords:

• Indian Ocean
• architecture
• urbanism
• geography
• globalisation

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to Temple University, Philadelphia, USA for a study leave and grant in aid of research in 2009 and a summer research award in 2011, which enabled field trips to the sites covered in this paper, and to Naquib Hossain, who facilitated my visit to the ship-breaking yards in Bhatiari. The research has been presented a number of times, including at Temple University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Minnesota, Goldsmiths College University College, London, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the 2010 AZA Congress in Johannesburg. I am also grateful to the peer reviewers of this paper, who introduced me to many new references for the research and whose comments improved the paper tremendously.

Notes

1. The paper draws on a wider research project on the Indian Ocean in progress, titled Folded ocean.

2. Folded ocean looks at the ocean through five intersecting lenses: contemporary oceanic and maritime practices (fishing, merchant shipping, ship-breaking, ocean-floor drilling, piracy and tourism); international law and geopolitics (international conventions, treatises and regional alliances); historical and contemporary cartographic practices; fictional representations of the ocean; and the changing geophysical environment. It investigates the spatial and architectural consequences of such practices such as ship-breaking yards, pirate networks, container ports, tourist resorts, military bases, refugee camps, etc., and asks what these spatial products might mean for global architectural and urban scholarship and practice.

3. In 2006, Easterling (2008) identified between 3000 and 4000 zones of 66 different zone designations operating in 130 countries.These included free trade zones, export processing zones, special economic zones, industrial parks and economic cities.

4. It is one of a number of port, corridor and oil pipeline projects around the Ocean – notably at Gwadar in Pakistan and Hambantota in Sri Lanka, through which the USA, China, India and other regional powers are recalibrating the Ocean around security and resource extraction protocols and where coastlines are being developed in line with neoliberal ideas (Gupta, 2012; Kaplan, 2010).

5. These include The Forest Act of 2005, The Wildlife Conservation and Management Act of 1989, The Fisheries Act of 1991, The National Museums and Heritage Act of 2006, and the Kenyan Constitution of 2010. Kenya is signatory to The Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage (Paris, 1972), The Convention on Wetland of International Importance (Ramsar, 1971) and the Convention on Biological Diversity (1992). In terms of Kenya's Environmental Management and Co-ordination Act of 1999, the project required an environmental impact assessment, an archaeological impact assessment and an HIV/Aids prevention plan before construction could commence. Tender documents for the first three port berths were prepared without this having taken place. (JPC & BAC/GKA JV, 2011).

6. The Jones Act (United States, 1920) forbids sale of US government ships to foreign companies and the Toxic Substances Control Act (United States, 1976) forbids the export or the distribution in commerce of polychlorinated biphenyls, which are highly toxic compounds of chlorine and benzene and were once widely used in ship construction.

7. The USA still operates two ship-breaking yards, at Chesapeake, VA and Brownsville, TX, where ships from the three federal Ghost Fleets (surplus ships built in the 1950s and held in reserve to be activated in times of war) are taken apart (Center for Land Use Interpretation, 2010). In Europe, yards still operate in the ports of Gand in Belgium, Scheepssloperij in the Netherlands, Grenaa and Esburg in Denmark and Klaipeda in Lithuania (General Secretariat of the Sea, no date).

8. Workers come from Nandail, north of Kishorganj; Saria Kandi, near Bogra; and Chandan Baisha, Dac Bangla and Kolni Bari, south of Saria Kandi (Greenpeace & International Federation for Human Rights in co-operation with Young Power for Social Action, 2005).

9. Similar conflicting territorial claims and disputes over navigation rights between Iran and Iraq in the Shat Al-Arab were among the main factors for the Iraq–Iran War of 1980–1988 (Dugdale-Pointon, 2002).

10. An exclusive economic zone of 20 nautical miles is automatic, but a claim over the continental shelf has to be taken to arbitration or brought before ITLOS.