The Violence of the Port Assemblage Vs. an Aquatic Rhythm of the City: The Case of Buenaventura

Buenaventura is Colombia's biggest port city, where almost half of its external trade is handled. During the past 10 years, it has also been the site of extreme violence. The paper explores how Buenaventura’s Urban is transformed through spatial and temporal, recurring practices of violence. What role does violence play in the relation between trade-driven acceleration through the port, and the aquatic rhythm the city history is based on? The paper draws on contributions that perceive the aquatic space of the Afro-Colombian Pacific as an assemblage (Oslender, 2004, 2016), and discusses the ways in which disruption can be a helpful concept to analyse the frictions emerging between the port as a node of acceleration, inhabitants’ movements and the aquatic rhythm of the city.