On October 25, 2013, the Berkeley Planning Journal hosted Professor Manuel Castells in a round-table discussion with doctoral and master’s students from the Department of City and Regional Planning. Professor Castells is a leading expert worldwide in the social sciences. He is Professor Emeritus of City and Regional Planning and of Sociology at UC Berkeley, where he taught from 1979 to 2003. The Spanish sociologist is a prominent scholar globalization, and information society, and currently holds the Wallis Annenberg Chair in Communication Technology and Society at the University of Southern California.

The round-table discussion coincided with Professor Castells’s lecture at the College of Environmental Design entitled “Space of Flows and Space of Places in Networked Social Movements” and follows the publication of his most recent book, Networks of Outrage and Hope (2012). Both the lecture and the discussion focused on Castells’s most recent work on new forms of social movements and protests that are erupting across the world, from the Arab uprisings to the indignadas of Spain and the Occupy Wall Street movement in the United States. Jake Wegmann served as the discussion moderator.

For more than a century, coal has been the principal fuel of the city. Coal not only produces power after it is burned; it also fuels processes of urbanization and dispossession. Long after coal is distributed through power lines, coal circulates hundreds of miles across the city’s lands, rivers, and atmospheres in profoundly uneven and unpredictable ways. How has the city shaped, and been shaped by, the production and distribution of coal power? How has coal transformed social and spatial relations in the city? How might tracing contests over the meaning and politics of coal change how we conceptualize the city’s pasts and its futures?

Drawing upon multi-sited fieldwork along the rapidly urbanizing coast of Chennai, this dissertation project tracks the ways in which coal circulates within and across the city’s infrastructures, from power plants and transmission lines to pipelines and ports. The dissertation calls for attention to the ways in which energy infrastructures—and their constitutive exclusions—are crucial sites from which to rethink processes of urbanization and dispossession. I argue that the circulation of coal within, across, and through urban space is accomplished through the politics of dispossession: an ensemble of legal and planning practices that dispossess artisanal fishing villages in order to expand the coal industry. The dissertation consists of five chapters that analyze how the combustion and circulation of coal hydrocarbons, from the late colonial period to the present, has made and remade spatial boundaries of the public and private, wastelands and commons, legality and illegality. In doing so, the dissertation reframes analytical debates concerning the limits of postcolonial development and dispossession.

The dissertation demonstrates that the ongoing expansion of the coal industry along the shorelines of south India crucially depends upon the illicit conversion of coastal wetlands and the dispossession of the landscapes and waterscapes of artisanal fishing villages. Such processes, however, are not accomplished by coercion alone, but through technologies of environmental planning, including land use and coastal zone maps. The project also provides an account of how fishers and activists have articulated new political coalitions that challenge the expansion of the coal industry through community-based mapping techniques, environmental litigation, and grassroots mobilization across the city.