Introduction to the Special Feature. Coastal commons: Littoral urbanisms, Afro-Indigenous relations, and small coastal cities

Source abstract

Coastal Commons brings together a set of visual essays that read urbanisation from the littoral, where water, work, ritual, and governance meet at small scale and close range. Grounded in sustained collaboration across the Costa Chica of Guerrero and Oaxaca, the Special Feature treats Afro Indigenous not as a prescriptive identity label but as a geohistorical analytic for coastal relations, and it foregrounds refusal and repair as practical and conceptual orientations. The contributions are organised through three braids, water as commons and labour as care; ritual, refusal, and the spectral commons; and governance, recognition, and the price of being seen. Across these braids, the essays examine infrastructural neglect and uneven protection, disaster and risk, intergenerational memory and reconciliation, youth organising, and the politics of visibility and capture. Methodologically, the Special Feature treats images, captions, and first person voice as sites of argument rather than illustration, situating expertise in lived coastal worlds and in the relational practices that sustain them.