Ports are infrastructural hubs connecting sea and hinterlands. These material structures are shapers of economic flows of goods, people and knowledge and they are embedded in geopolitical dynamics. But what goes into the making of these infrastructures? How are they embedded in everyday practices of state authorities, corporate designers and constructors? How do they affect the lives of citizens living in their vicinity and the users of transport corridors? For studying how global port developments are grounded in human experiences and daily practices – both at land and at sea – we need to approach infrastructures not as objects, but as relational networks which are constructed, maintained, used as well as contested. Through a multidisciplinary and critical approach, our aim is to explore and reflect on the following topics and issues: the geopolitics of infrastructural assemblages; the social fife of infrastructure projects: from masterplan to material terrains; the everyday processes of design; the ways in which these infrastructural networks allow institutional actors (both public and private) and citizens to live, to imagine and to propose (designing of) futures; in situ interactions expressing the lived cultural worlds of designed infrastructure networks and their users; the temporality of infrastructure; the territorial effects of infrastructure and how this impacts existing rights and uses of land and shorelines; infrastructural violence; infrastructures of security, and surveillance. These lines of research merit explicit attention to the production of maps and visual accounts both as an item for ethnographic scrutiny and as part of research practices.
