Durban’s port-petrochemical complex as a site of economic and environmental violence

A proposed massive expansion of a petrochemical complex in South Durban’s port area has come under criticism for both economic and environmental violence. The recent history of cities becoming hyperactive export platforms is not merely a function of globalisation. Public policy is a factor, and especially the intellectual project of urban neoliberalism; the strategy was explicit in South Africa’s transition from apartheid to export-oriented neoliberalism. There is nowhere better than Durban, South Africa, to enquire into the port-related urban economic and also environmental implications of the current more frenetic, crisis-riddled stage of world capitalism and mal-development.