The double movements of port cities: Top-down expansion,bottom-up resistance in Durban and Valencia

Abstract

Port cities stand at the center of the contradictions of supply-chain capitalism, where large-scale logistical expansion collides with social, economic, and environmental priorities on the ground. Drawing on critical logistics scholarship and ethnographic research, the article conceptualizes port infrastructure as a site of Polanyian double movement: while enabling the expansion of global circulation, it simultaneously provokes counter-movements, where alliances can form across sectors and where narrow single-issue politics (“Not In My Back Yard”) can be transcended. The analysis examines Durban, South Africa, and Valencia, Spain—two cities confronting distinct port expansion projects that have given rise to wide-ranging social resistance. In Durban, the expansion of the port–petrochemical complex is rooted in extractivist logics, with social resistance envisioning solutions tied to just transition in the wake of contestations related to shipping volumes and oil refining capacity. In Valencia, port expansion aims at growing transshipment, reigniting longstanding disputes over urban livability, ecological sustainability, and post-growth development. While shaped by different histories and political trajectories, these struggles converge in exposing the uneven costs of logistical growth and in generating alternative visions of development and urban futures.