Subversive Submersives

The Unseen Urbanisation of the Southern Ocean

Abstract

The enormity of the ocean presents as an unusual physical obstacle that complicates claims for spaces being urbanised well beyond the traditional container of the city, such as the focus of this discussion: the Southern Ocean. Though commonly perceived as a pristine wilderness at the end of the earth, the ocean surrounding Antarctica has been imbricated in planetary-scale processes of urbanisation since the late eighteenth century, so the absence of this oceanic volume from twenty-first-century urban debates is troubling. Representations of the Antarctic as remote and disconnected from cities do nothing to contribute to a critical discussion of its ocean volume, technological histories or ongoing colonial settler imaginaries. Instead, attention might turn to codifying what the ocean increasingly contains by way of urban processes and, ultimately, what might be offered by confirming extended forms of urbanisation operating on and, importantly, through the earth. In this article I re-present the Southern Ocean via comparative cartographies and critical image-making to cross-examine what its occlusion signifies for the planetary reach of urbanisation. For underneath the machinery of extraction and exploitation lie significant questions regarding representations of the urban as they manifest outside conventions that overstate ‘the city’ as central to urbanisation.