In the history of colonial-capitalist urbanization, ports play a key role as a form of territoriality that links the development of urban space with the commodification of maritime space, the creation of precarious labor regimes with the appropriation of coastal ecosystems, and the configuration of global trade routes with the struggles of international geo-economic relations. In her contribution to the “Kin City” series, Aretousa Bloom zooms in on the port of Piraeus and asks: How does logistics reorganize urban and maritime space? And what does this tell us about the connections between social and environmental struggles?
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“What can we see when we linger at the water’s edge?” This is the question that Hannah Freed-Thall asks in her analysis of the significance of ports and beaches in twentieth-century social history. This is also the question that I find myself drawn to in an attempt to make sense of the ways in which capitalism reorders the coastal geographies of ports, in this case the Port of Piraeus outside of Athens, Greece.
Ports play a unique role in the history of capitalism. If the sea is foundational to capitalist development, as Campling and Colás argue, what defines this relationship is capital’s attempt to overcome the “land-sea binary in an incessant quest for profit.” This process, in turn, gives rise to different forms of “terraqueous territoriality,” that is, distinct forms of coastal and marine enclosure, commodification, and financialization (Campling and Colás, 2021).
A unique kind of terraqueous territory
Ports are then intensified sites of carbon combustion, exploitation, and socio-ecological degradation. They are “messy” spaces, as Deborah Cowen observes, that make visible often disparate fields of activity. We can think of the port, and especially the logistical port, as a unique kind of terraqueous territory that brings together marine and terrestrial ecosystems, imperial and military routes, warehouses and containers, cybernetic techniques of automation and optimization, and a multitude of people and organizations, from dockworkers and port residents to logistics companies and port authorities.
Logistics is about more than the simple coordination of commodities and raw materials across supply chains, Charmaine Chua (2022) incisively argues. Rather, it is a system of capitalist organization, premised on the “logic of distributional efficiency” and its infrastructural, territorial, and financial expansion into different realms of everyday life. But logistical expansion is never a smooth process, despite these “fantasies of control,” Chua contends. At its core, logistics is a fragile and vulnerable system that is regularly confronted with contradictions, tensions, and antagonisms.
So how does logistics reorder urban and maritime space in the case of Piraeus? And what does this tell us about the links between social and environmental struggles? In this short essay, I sketch out the contours of the port’s transformation, drawing on scholarly research, media investigations, and union reports.
Developing the Port of Piraeus
Strategically located along key maritime routes, including the Black Sea and the Suez Canal, Piraeus is one of the largest and fastest growing ports in the Mediterranean. Over the past 15 years, the logistics-driven urbanization of Piraeus (Danyluk, 2021) has transformed the port into a central node for the accumulation of global shipping and real estate capital. Much of this transformation can be attributed to China’s Ocean Shipping Company’s (COSCO) growing influence in the management and ownership of the port. In 2009, the state-owned Chinese shipping conglomerate signed a 35-year concession agreement to control and expand the port’s cargo terminal. Set against the backdrop of Greece’s sovereign debt crisis, COSCO acquired a 51% stake in the port from the Greek government in a deal facilitated by the Hellenic Republic Asset Development Fund – a fund established to liquidate public assets and meet the demands of Greece’s creditors (the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund) – before increasing it to 67% in 2021 on the condition that the company would fulfill a series of infrastructure investments in the port. COSCO’s acquisition of the Port of Piraeus is a key component of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the vast project of state-led infrastructural investment aimed at expanding global trade across Asia, Europe, Africa, and South America.
At the center of COSCO’s masterplan for the transformation of Piraeus into a ‘maritime city,’ is a vision of a modernized port consisting of an expanded cruise pier, a new logistics hub, a revitalized shipping repair yard, as well the development of hotels and real estate along the coastline. COSCO’s coastal expansion through land reclamation and the dredging of port’s seabed has been met with resistance, from residents, labor movements, and environmental groups.
Anthi Giannoulou, a Piraeus lawyer who represented residents and labor organizations in the legal fight to stop the cruise pier expansion, describes in an interview with Konstantinos Tsimonis how the New Democracy-PASOK coalition authorized the Port of Piraeus Authority (PPA) to construct a new pier in 2013, using materials from nearby quarries. Five years later, under the SYRIZA government, the Ministry of the Environment reversed its position. Giannoulou explains how the government authorized dredging, or the removal of sediment from the seabed, in areas where COSCO planned to deepen the port to accommodate larger cargo ships. COSCO, which had taken over the public project after it was financed and effectively de-risked by the European Investment Bank, then attempted to proceed with the works without an updated environmental impact assessment, a violation of EU regulations. Despite a court order issued to halt the project in 2021, reports from eyewitnesses suggest that COSCO continued dredging the seabed, dumping the spoils – mud, silt, and sand laden with toxic heavy metals like arsenic and cadmium – into the Saronic Gulf, an area of the sea that is heavily used for fishing (Boutsi, 2021).
The retreat of environmental protection laws
Since then, labor and activist groups have continued fighting to stop the removal and disposal of contaminated material in the sea. In 2022, Giannoulou’s coalition, which includes the Piraeus Labor Center and local citizens, won an important victory when the Council of State, Greece’s highest administrative court, ruled that COSCO’s previous pier expansion was illegal due to the lack of an environmental impact assessment. But in 2023, the Ministry of Environment gave the green light for dredging works to begin once again. On May 20, 2024, only three days after another temporary injunction was granted to the grassroots coalition, the Council of State overturned the decision to suspend COSCO’s and the Piraeus Port Authority’s (PPA) cruise terminal expansion. The Council of State ruled, in light of documentation sent by the Ministry of Environment, that dredging was necessary to prevent the risk of ships running aground (Efsyn, 2024). The state then, has played an important role in facilitating the appropriation and exploitation of Piraeus’ coastal ecologies by COSCO. It bears emphasis, that Piraeus’ logistical transformation is only made possible through the parallel expansion of a legal space where regulations and protections are suspended or distorted.
If the Greek state has actively participated in creating conditions that have allowed COSCO to bypass environmental protection laws, Greek ship owners, who have benefited from the port’s growth (Tsimomis, 2023), have played a no less significant role in mediating Piraeus’ logistics-driven transformation. The US played a critical role in financing and imbricating the strategic role of Greek shipping in the political economy of energy in the post-war period, aligning the operations of oil-carrying Greek tankers with American imperial interests (Kosmatopoulos, 2023; Serafetinidis et al. 1981). Yet in recent years, this relationship has been reconfigured as Greek ship owners have established close relationships with Chinese Banks who finance the construction of Greek vessels in shipyards in Shanghai and Jiangsu. Greek ship owners also lease a significant number of their vessels to Chinese firms and transport fuel and other raw materials to China (Van de Putten et al., 2016; Bloom, 2021). Indeed, research suggests that this relationship of mutual interdependence may have facilitated the original COSCO deal in Piraeus well before Greece’s sovereign debt crisis (Bloom, 2021).
The port’s other labor world
In its attempt to create extract surplus value and to “smooth out the irregularities of capitalist operations “ (Chua, 2022), logistics reorders social and spatial relations by “breaking the bargaining power” of port and transport workers, as Alberto Toscano argues. We see this in COSCO’s attempt to transform the port of Piraeus into a global transshipment hub (Nielson, 2018) by splintering the labor force through a complex system of sub-contracting and union manipulation.
In Pier I, workers employed by the Piraeus Port Authority (PPA) are more likely to have permanent contracts and guaranteed overtime pay, and maintain stronger organizing power within a territory they are familiar with. In contrast, COSCO’s employees in Piers II and III – what Hatzopoulos and colleagues call “Piraeus Port’s other labor world” – are much more precarious. Workers on this side of the port, many of whom were members of the newly created, communist Union of Container Handling Workers (ENEDEP) were forced to join a different union, when they were enrolled, without their knowledge to SYNEDEP, a union established by COSCO’s subcontractors in 2018. There is also evidence suggesting that SYNEDEP has links to the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn organization, which has played a role in disorganizing worker struggles in parts of the capital (Jackson, Li, & Masino, 2024).
The creation of a flexible regime force, as Brett Nielson (2018) argues, has also been compounded by Greece’s austerity politics, through a “an overregulation of labor antagonism,” as labor laws were passed to abolish collective bargaining agreements as part of a broader set of reforms stipulated by Greece’s creditors. Moreover, in 2017, a law was passed by SYRIZA that stripped port workers of safety and workers’ rights, and enabled COSCO to use individual contract, and bypass safety regulations facilitating effectively the transformation of Piraeus into a kind special economic zone (Rizospastis, 2018).
This splintering and fragmentation of labor power, combined with the profit-driven motives of logistical capital, which in Piraeus, has seen record profits (Kathimerini, 2024), has led to a rise in fatalities and accidents. In 2021, Dimitris Daglis died after working a double shift when he was struck by a gantry crane. In response, members of ENEDEP rallied for safer working conditions, and for the abolition of back-to-back and unpredictable schedules, threatening to disrupt supply chains. A collective bargaining agreement was finally signed between COSCO’s subsidiary (Piraeus Container Terminal) and the union for all workers in the COSCO-controlled docks (PAME HELLAS, 2022). Yet port workers continue to face the risk of physical injury or death, as highlighted by reports of containers falling off stacks at the COSCO docks (Efsyn 2022; Maritime Executive 2024). We need to think of these incidents, and the attendant limitations of logistical optimization technologies, not as exceptions but instead as central to the operation of logistical capital and its imperative for speed.
Convergence of labor and ecological struggle
Piraeus’ labor and ecological struggles are intimately interconnected. We cannot think of the violence of dredging and the destruction of marine ecosystems, as well as wider pollution created by tankers, oil cruise ships, refueling tanks, and cars in a densely populated city like Piraeus, without also taking into account the particular ways in which logistical capitalism works to break the bargaining power and life that sustains port workers and residents.
The port, as Juan De Lara (2018) reminds us in the case of Los Angeles, is literally “killing people.” The logistical port, as a prime instantiation of our “terraqueous predicament,” gives rise to a form of territoriality that links the commodification of maritime space with precarious work regimes, austerity politics, and the reconfiguration of global trade routes and Sino-Greek shipping relations. Critically, this emerging configuration has been met with antagonism, from socio-ecological mobilizations, as illustrated in this article, to counter-logistical resistance, and internationalism.