ContainerHavens is a four-year multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary research project funded by the Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (FWO), examining cargo ports as contested spaces where law, labour, land, and logistics converge and (often) collide. The project stems from a foundational recognition: ports are not just abstract spaces or mere logistic hubs. They are material infrastructures, workplaces, neighbourhoods, ecosystems, and political arenas. Ports are spaces where the implications of global production and circulation territorialise, and shape local dynamics, distributive patterns and forms of resistance.

 For centuries, ports have been at the centre of transformations involving people, territories, and the relationship between land and sea. These transformations are neither neutral nor isolated. They generate intersecting conflicts over jobs, health, land, pollution, and the direction of economic growth. Ports are not simply infrastructures of circulation, but contested legal, ecological and political infrastructures that distribute benefits and harms unevenly.

ContainerHavens is guided by two key questions:

Are port struggles across labour, environment, and community fronts reconfiguring the legal and economic architectures that structure ports, or are they in fact constrained by them? How are these struggles unfolding, and are their actors and aspirations converging?

To answer these questions, the research team (led by PhD researchers Peter Kimani and Adriane Montenegro) is conducting empirical fieldwork across five major container ports: Antwerp, Cartagena, San Pedro Bay, Shanghai and Tangier, producing new knowledge and reflections at the intersection of multiple disciplines and lived experiences.

ContainerHavens is co-organised by the University of Antwerp Faculty of Law in Belgium (Prof. Tomaso Ferrando), the Faculty of Law of the Universidad del Rosario in Colombia (Prof. Enrique Prieto Ríos), and the Institute for Cities and Real Estate in Emerging Markets at NYU Shanghai (Prof. Aleksandar Stojanovic).