Urban aloha ‘aina: Kaka‘ako and a decolonized right to the city

This essay critically examines the relationship between capitalism, development, and settler colonialism using Kakaʻako, an urban district of Honolulu, Hawaiʻi, as a case study. Given that Kakaʻako’s luxury development boom is occurring in conjunction with a severe cost-of-living crisis, I argue that the corporate-driven renewal of Kakaʻako constitutes a settler colonial project of erasure and accumulation through Indigenous dispossession. Crucially, the participation of Indigenous landowning entities in Kakaʻako’s redevelopment highlights the need to understand how capitalist exploitation can operate across the settler-native binary through the deployment of a worldview that renders land a commodity. In contrast, the Kanaka Maoli worldview understands land as ʻāina-that which feeds. This understanding undergirds calls for aloha ʻāina, a relationship of responsibility and respect between the land and its people. In rural spaces, aloha ʻāina has been enacted as resistance against colonialism and development, but settler spatial regimes have largely been successful in framing Honolulu as ‘settled’ space. I argue that when exercised in the city, aloha ʻāina provides a historically situated, place-based, and radical framework for urban spatial justice.