Sinamalé Bridge: reimagining horizons and renegotiating urban identities in the altered landscapes of the Maldives archipelago

Abstract

Based on 24 months of ethnographic fieldwork on the islands of Malé and Hulhumalé in Dhivehi Raajje (Republic of Maldives), this thesis explores the Sinamalé Bridge, an over-water bridge in an island archipelago, as a horizon-altering addition to the landscape. It is an ‘unfamiliar’ feature in the land/sea/scape that triggers desires, imagined possibilities of the future, dread, and anxieties of the unknown.

By virtue of its technology, it connected two residential islands and ‘expanded’ the landscape. The bridge sparked a reimagination of the human and political borders and boundaries and delineated the periphery within which Dhivehin (people of Dhivehi Raajje) experience and interpret their place-worlds. By looking at the conflicts, control, and negotiations in this space I explore how the altered landscape shapes the ways individuals perform identity, religion, kinship, and gendered relations. This thesis uses a framework that integrates scholarly debates on horizon and imagination, cities and the urban, landscapes and islands and is inspired by critical debates in infrastructure studies.

This thesis considers the ‘archipelagic natures’ of the islands and how the naturally ‘kept-apartness’ of the two islands is collapsed by the ‘bridging’ of the islands, thereby expanding the landscape. The bridge has redefined the vistas of Malé and Hulhumalé, reshaping the spatial and social geography of the region, affecting the delimitation within which imaginative potentialities is possible. Through critical autoethnography of the urban dwellers living and moving between Malé and Hulhumalé I show how issues of jurisdiction, discriminatory tropes between island people and Malé people, and new notions of island sociality materialized after the bridge opened. This is especially significant for individuals who experienced the ‘kept-apartness’ as a rural-urban, uncultured-civilized divide. I establish that encounters with the bridge inspire a reimagination of the urban space as individuals creatively deploy the altered landscape to make claims to the city. This thesis highlights how this topographic feature both connected and dissected the landscape and redefined the political and human borders and boundaries within which Dhivehin viewed/imagined/made the beyond of the bridge.