ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the extension of urban processes beyond urban cores to so-called “hinterlands”—including ocean hinterlands—brings variants of specific urban transformations, such as gentrification, to these spaces. The result is not only ocean urbanization, as some have dubbed this process, but also a form of ocean gentrification, conceived here as the shifting racial and class characteristics of vessel owners and shippers present on regional sea routes. The emergence of Haitian breakbulk shipping networks between the Miami River and provincial Haitian ports during the last three decades of the twentieth century offers a compelling case for exploring how the redevelopment of urban ports reverberates through extended commodity chain geographies, reworking sea routes and far-flung economies in the process. By looking to the improbable and, for many, unwanted commercial networks Haitians have fashioned between South Florida and Haiti, the racialization of the Miami River that took shape as a result of these new geographies, and the efforts to remake the working river, one can see how the gentrification of the port can become the gentrification of the sea.
