Basins, barriers and human-marine (im)mobile encounters: The mundane realities of post-industrial waterfront regeneration in London’s Royal Docks

• Explores the relation between regeneration, everyday realities and water mobilities. • Post-industrial waterfront regeneration can restrict people’s mundane mobilities. • London’s Royal Docks showcase the importance of free human-marine interactions. • The (im)mobility of marine spaces can both uplift and undermine urban regeneration. • Climate change is aggravating securitisation and fixation of city-river interfaces. This paper examines the lived implications of post-industrial waterfront regeneration, based on a qualitative study of the Royal Docks in east London (United Kingdom). Since losing their industrial-maritime functionality in 1981, the Royal Docks have attracted a multitude of regeneration projects, variably aimed at redeveloping the expansive, rectilinear and purpose-built waterscapes whilst attracting global flows of (hyper)mobility and investment. Bordering the river Thames and its increasingly volatile marine conditions, and home to Britain’s primary flood barrier, the Royal Docks also constitute a critical climate change frontline for London. This former dockland, in short, progressively resembles a hybrid socio-technical terrain, the regeneration of which involves mediating the fixities of an industrial past, fluidities of a climate-changing future and mounting pressures of an urbanising world. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic observations, this paper studies the everyday experiences of people living amidst the Royal Docks’ regeneration, focusing on residents’ mundane mobility practices and aspirations. It argues that, beneath oft-criticised dynamics of gentrification and relocation, an underacknowledged implication of post-industrial waterfront regeneration concerns the restriction free, informal (im)mobile encounters with marine places and processes, including water-based recreation. It also demonstrates the potency of heeding the movements and immobilisations of waterscapes: beyond static, sellable backdrops, dock basins and riverfronts constitute complex socio-natural entities whose (imposed) (im)mobilities can both uplift and undermine everyday urban realities and renewal prospects. Foregrounding the shifting (dis)entanglements of human and marine mobilities presents a crucial step towards challenging the land-based logics and illuminating the nuanced, mundane realities of post-industrial waterfront regeneration.