UC Santa Cruz

The intensity of the maritime traffic across the Eastern Mediterranean signals that the movements of ships are tied to and routed with the convulsions of unstable Mediterranean economies and regimes. Along their route between Turkey and Greece, formerly detached rural coastal towns turn into industrial boom towns. In my research, I explore the economic, political, and environmental development of coastal towns in the Gulf of Izmit in Northwestern Turkey, which reached its peak and turned remote towns into international shipping hubs at the beginning of the 2000s. Heterogeneous and unequal encounters between the landscape/seascape and the boom-and-bust economy of coastal towns led to new arrangements of coastal environments of a hardened shelf. Further the sediment in the Gulf’s basins restored years of industrial runoff and kept a record of coastal development. From algae in ballast water to anti-fouling paint sloughing off the hulls, ships carry much more than their manifests describe. Ships bring places with them, creating new inter-place dynamics in their materiality. I track the events that escalated the transformation of out-of-the-way small towns into shipping hubs in the Gulf of Izmit. Specifically, my project uses ethnographic work among maritime industry workers, municipal archives, regulatory agencies, marine biologists, and residents of these towns. By digging into the material landscape of insular concrete infrastructures, logistics hubs, and coastal waterscape, my project illuminates the processes that shift the geo-bio-morphology of the narrow, enclosed sea. I argue that shipping makes coasts in its historical and material contingencies, and that the sea is not a smooth surface for the speed of logistics but is full with entanglements.