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Port work has historically been labour intensive. Before the widespread adoption of containers, most cargo, except liquid and dry bulk, was handled as break-bulk, and (un)loaded piece by piece.1 This process was often labour-intensive, slow, and prone to cargo damage and workers’ injuries.  Containerisation in the 1960s revolutionised cargo handling and intermodal logistics.2 New infrastructure, like the gantry cranes that lifted and moved containers, transformed cargo operations. Standardised containers cut loading times, increased reliability, reduced […]

In 2017, Frank Van Houtte was trying to protect a nature reserve near his home in Boom, in the Rupel valley south of Antwerp, from a plan to dump 4.5 million cubic metres of construction soil into it. The soil was coming from Oosterweel, a major infrastructure project on the port of Antwerp-Bruges’s left bank designed to extend the

The (il)logic driving container port competitiveness across the world is consistent: growth is pursued at all costs, operations are increasingly concentrated and fragile, and the benefits and burdens are unevenly distributed. While profits arising from these transformations are mostly privatised, costs are externalised onto workers, communities, the environment, public health, and public budgets. The geography of injustices this generates is not accidental, it is embedded within the systematic logic of the just-in-time, of uneven trade relationships, and of the intensification of transnational production and consumption.