This article explores how residents of a small coastal fishing enclave in Colombo live with cumulative waves of dispossession brought on by exclusionary projects of urban development. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I introduce the analytic of navigation to describe how people move, plan and live with both present and future threats of dispossession. Navigation offers a unique perspective on questions of agency and resistance in oppressive conditions. Rather than framing subjects as "resisting" projects of world-class city-making, this analysis shows that urban residents instead engage in complex and occasionally contradictory modes of living with uncertainty. I complicate existing understandings of the term "navigation" by describing how questions of nation and belonging are crucial to comprehending how people navigate. Ultimately, I suggest that expressions of belonging and obligation to an imagined community might not only be strategic, but instead reflect some of the broader social forces which structure possibilities for action.

This paper explores questions of mobility, ethnicity and spatial imaginaries in Sri Lanka through the experiences of fishermen in Mutuwall, a neighbourhood of Colombo. While scholars of Sri Lanka have explored the historically contingent nature of Sri Lanka's island-identity, this paper engages with the contemporary construction of island-ness through ethnographic fieldwork with 21 st century residents of the city. Through fishers' accounts of their prewar itinerant lifestyles and their experiences living in the coastal High Security Zone during the civil conflict, this essay juxtaposes the free movement of fishers before the war with the heavily restricted movement they experienced at the height of the tensions between the Sri Lankan state and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. Fisher itineraries can be understood as dovetailing with state imaginaries of island-wide sovereignty even as they challenge it by describing subaltern movement through space. Ultimately, this paper suggests the importance of contemporary modes of "doing" Indian Ocean studies.

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This paper explores how the aspirational urban form of the ‘world-class city’ is produced from within the city itself. Rather than focusing on global competition between cities, the analysis considers how local actors in key industries discursively and materially produce the world-class city through their labor. The analytic of connection is introduced as central to understanding how world-class city-making projects are achieved. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Colombo’s high-end real estate sector, the article examines how a successful broker creates and manages connections across different scales and registers. It focuses on three key areas: (1) the rhetorical connections drawn between luxury real estate and national development; (2) the connections created between wealthy foreign clients and local property owners and (3) the work of connecting disparate narratives about supply and demand for luxury housing. I highlight that against the backdrop of considerable economic and political uncertainty, connections are valuable even if they do not result in immediate profit. Offering a glimpse into the world of white-collar professionals in the luxury real estate industry, this paper underscores that world-class city-making projects are embedded in local realities even as they reflect generalized patterns of urban development.