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Geoforum
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum
Critical review
Envisioning African Futures: Development corridors as dreamscapes of
modernity
Detlef Müller-Mahn
Department of Geography, University of Bonn, Meckenheimer Allee 166, 53129 Bonn, Germany
ARTICLE INFO
Keywords:
Development corridors
Dreamscapes of modernity
Future-making
Africa
Spatial development
Decoloniality
ABSTRACT
This critical review paper scrutinizes development corridors as ‘dreamscapes of modernity’and showcases of
‘future-making’. I argue that corridors have become dominant blue-prints for spatial development because of a
specific way in which they express, perform and implement ‘desirable futures’. I refer to three strands of con-
ceptual debates. The first discusses how futures are ‘made’and can be empirically approached through practices
of future-making. The second looks at imaginations of African futures in relation to images of the continent itself.
The third takes the empirical example of development corridors in Africa to scrutinize their meaning as
‘dreamscapes of modernity’. At the end, I will revisit recent calls for closer integration between economic
geography and development studies, to which I suggest to add a concern for post- and decolonial positions and
‘theory from the south’.
1. Introduction
Development corridors are criss-crossing the African continent.
Some exist only on paper, others have already become real as zones of
investment and accelerated growth. Regardless of their current stage of
implementation, they are powerful tools of spatial planning, with far-
reaching effects for rural populations and environments (Enns, 2018).
This critical review paper scrutinizes development corridors as
‘dreamscapes of modernity’and showcases of ‘future-making’(Jasanoff
and Kim, 2015;Appadurai, 2013). I argue that corridors have become
dominant blue-prints for spatial development because of a specific way
in which they express, perform and implement ‘desirable futures’. The
approach is not meant as an alternative to political economy explana-
tions that view development corridors primarily as entry points of
global capitalism (for example Bergius et al., 2017), but rather as a
complimentary perspective. I refer to three strands of conceptual de-
bates. The first discusses how futures are “made”and can be empirically
approached through practices of future-making. The second looks at
imaginations of African futures in relation to images of the continent
itself. The third takes the empirical example of development corridors
in Africa to scrutinize their meaning as ‘dreamscapes of modernity’.At
the end, I will revisit Murphy's (2008) call for closer integration be-
tween economic geography and development studies, to which I sug-
gest to add a concern for post- and decolonial positions and ‘theory
from the south’(Comaroffand Comaroff, 2012).
The paper builds upon a newly founded collaborative research
centre ‘Future Rural Africa’, where researchers from the universities of
Bonn and Cologne cooperate with African partners in a long-term
program to investigate future-making and social-ecological transfor-
mation (see website www.futureruralafrica.de). The studies focus on
development corridors in Kenya, Tanzania and Namibia, assuming that
much of what affects future-making in Africa at the moment plays out
in rural areas and becomes visible there in terms of plans and projects,
societal negotiations and contestations, and multiple development ac-
tivities resulting in massive transformations of land-use and livelihoods.
2. Uncertainty, future-making, and the capacity to aspire
The future has always been an intellectual challenge, but nowadays
it seems to warrant particularly high attention due to a rising awareness
of uncertainty in contemporary ‘risk society’(Beck, 1999). Uncertainty
can be dealt with in diverse ways. One possible response uses ‘fictional
expectations’(Beckert, 2016), i.e. imaginations of future capitalist dy-
namics that are shared by economic actors (such as a collective wishful
thinking), resulting in coordinated action and simultaneous decision-
making. Another response is securitization, i.e. a strategy that attempts
to gain control over the future by silencing alternative voices and ideas
(Ahlqvist and Rhisiart, 2015). In the past, people used divination, sa-
crifice, or other rituals to prepare for their future, while nowadays they
do the same by means of forecasts, scenarios, and development plans.
Future-making and development practice are closely related, because
they can both be understood as attempts to gain control over the future
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2019.05.027
Received 15 May 2019; Accepted 31 May 2019
E-mail address: mueller-mahn@uni-bonn.de.
Geoforum xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx
0016-7185/ © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Please cite this article as: Detlef Müller-Mahn, Geoforum, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2019.05.027
and reduce uncertainty.
In the following, I apply this idea to the observation of mush-
rooming development corridors in Africa. Like other planning tools,
they aim at shaping future conditions by simultaneously projecting
visions into the future and into space. Such visionary spatial-temporal
projections may well be called ‘utopian’, since the term ‘utopia’refers to
a‘topos’, a distant place like the cast-away island in Thomas Morus’s
famous novel from 500 years ago. The island ‘Utopia’represents an
ideal organisation of state and society in harmony with the natural
environment. Utopian thinking has long influenced political debates,
most prominently in the late 19th and first half of the 20th century.
The future is essentially a social category, since it is based on shared
aspirations and anxieties. It does not simply emerge out of the present,
but is socially produced through practices that make it an issue in the
present. Appadurai (2013) distinguishes three practices of future-
making, namely imagination, aspiration and anticipation; in a similar
vein, Jasanoff(2015) describes imagination as a collective social
practice. Anderson (1983) had already pointed out in his work on
‘imagined communities’that social cohesion, the feeling of ‘we’against
‘others’, and the constitution of communities essentially depend on
shared imaginations of a common future.
Making the future an object of collective imagination and commu-
nity-building, however, needs more than just vision and aspiration. It
requires performative action that creates greater visibility for some
future imaginations while silencing others. Future visions or imagina-
tions become powerful when everyone believes in them, just like
Beckert's ‘fictional expectations’, i.e., when a sufficiently large propor-
tion of a society or decision makers is convinced (or is made to believe)
that particular options of future developments are going to materialize,
while others are considered as not feasible, irrelevant, or undesirable.
Addressing this performative aspect of future-making requires an un-
derstanding of the way how future possibilities are discursively turned
into matters of fact, as if the future was already there.
In this context ‘sociotechnical imaginaries’play a crucial role.
Jasanoff(2015: 19) defines them as “collectively held, institutionally
stabilized, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures”. Being
both fluid and persistent at the same time, sociotechnical imaginaries
are “products and instruments of the coproduction of science, tech-
nology, and society in modernity”(Jasanoff, 2015: 19). Corridor mas-
terplans can be considered as sociotechnical imaginaries that corre-
spond with particular practices of future-making, aiming at the
conquering of underused spaces through ‘development’. However, the
question arises whose imaginations are employed, and what this does to
the local capacity to aspire.
3. Imagining African Futures
Current discourses about African futures are highly ambivalent. On
the one hand a deeply entrenched Afro-pessimism continues to view
Africa as a ‘lost continent’and hopeless case for international devel-
opment. On the other hand optimistic outlooks have become more
prominent over the past decade, expressed in notions like ‘Africa rising’
and ‘continent of opportunities’that envision African economies as
power houses for a stumbling world economy. The growth and devel-
opment optimism has been driven by conspicuous institutional alli-
ances, including the IMF, the African Development Bank and other
international finance organizations, which all have an obvious interest
in positive expectations. Bright futures have also been propagated by
the African Union and national governments adhering to ambitious
national development plans like Kenya's Vision 2030. It should be
noted, however, that these optimistic outlooks cannot simply be dis-
carded as wishful thinking of development agencies and politicians,
since they are also, at least to some extent, shared by African in-
tellectuals.
‘Africa is the future’has become a theme that cuts across recent
outputs from publications to arts to movies (see: Sarr, 2016, Goldstone
and Obarrio, 2016,‘Afrofuturism’,‘Black Panther’). One of the most
prominent authors among the Afro-optimists is Achille Mbembe, who
points out that the continent has leapfrogged technological develop-
ment at an unprecedented speed. Africa appears to have become “the
last frontier of capitalism”, which Mbembe (2015) sees as an opportu-
nity for abolishing internal boundaries and for the “reopening of Africa
to itself”. Yet, it is hard to believe that Achille Mbembe's and Felwine
Sarr’s imaginations of future Africa do really coincide with the World
Banḱs rhetoric of the ‘continent of opportunities’.
Imagining the future of Africa cannot be dissociated from the way
how the continent itself is imagined, and by whom. Under colonial rule
and the prevailing conditions of ‘global coloniality’(Ndlovu-Gatsheni,
2014), Africa has long been the object of foreign imaginations with a
focus on underutilized resources, extreme poverty or failed states.
Against this backdrop, such imaginations can only envision positive
futures as an antithesis to the perceived present deficiencies and
backwardness. Deeply entangled in global coloniality, such imagina-
tions are driven by a peculiar ‘will to improve’(Li, 2007). Prevailing
conditions of coloniality lead to practices of future-making that are
conceived as an equivalent to improvement, progress, and ordering, as
a civilizing mission, or in other words, as development.
Senegalese economist and writer Felwine Sarr (2016) makes a
strong appeal for decolonizing the imagination of African futures, and
for “a better rooting of the African economies in their respective so-
ciocultures”(Sarr, 2015). He argues that “[w]e need to stop mimicking
and dare to reinvent…” (Sarr, 2016), referring to African traditions and
their suitability to find solutions for contemporary problems. He asks
“to challenge the model provided by the colonizer”, i.e., to be inventive
and creative in designing African futures. In his critique of Western
concepts of development, Sarr contends that models should not simply
“be introduced because they have been successful elsewhere, (…) there
is no buy-in from people here”. Yet, the argument should not be mis-
understood as a naïve romanticization of an African past, but as a call
for independent thinking. Knowledge production and development on
the African continent that are largely elite-driven projects tend to copy
models of modernization from other parts of the world and paste them
into African contexts, without sufficiently taking account of African
tradition, culture and vision. According to Sarr (2016), there are al-
ternative ways of shaping African futures, since “our governments are
not hand-bound to follow the orders of global capitalism”and he con-
cludes: “We should not necessarily adopt a solution found in Europe”.
Sarr's position is shared by other critical African intellectuals, but it
is certainly not in line with the dominant practice of development. This
raises the question how alternative African futures may look like, who
formulates them, and whether there is space for them to unfold under
the dominant architecture of power. In other words: “Can Africans
create African futures within a modern world system structured by
global coloniality?”(Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2014: 181)
4. African development corridors as dreamscapes of modernity
Development corridors are planning tools for spatial development,
using road and transport infrastructure for better linkages between
rural peripheries and urban growth poles. The literature offers a wide
range of definitions, each focussing on particular aspects (Gálvez
Nogales, 2014, Gálvez Nogales and Webber, 2017, Reeg, 2017). Hope
and Cox (2015) for example distinguish between different types of
corridors according to the level of regional integration, from simple
road and transport corridors through agricultural or industrial growth
corridors to integrated economic corridors.
The initial idea of conceptualizing development corridors as plan-
ning tools builds upon the observation that roads have always been
‘carriers’of innovation and growth impulses. Early publications high-
light the concept's response to the problematic spatial inequality of
development (Gaile, 1977), and present it as a strategy to combine
regional rural development policies with the creation of growth centres
D. Müller-Mahn Geoforum xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx
2
(Richardson, 1978). The concept was first applied for transboundary
axes of communication and economic development for European in-
tegration (Pottier, 1963). Its applicability for African regional devel-
opment had already been discussed in South Africa in the 1980s before
it was used for the implementation of the Maputo –Johannesburg
transboundary corridor in the early 1990ies, i.e. shortly after the
abolishment of Apartheid and the end of the Mozambican Civil War
(Geyer, 1988). Quite obviously, this corridor between the two neigh-
bouring countries did not only serve economic purposes, but also po-
litical interests on both sides. After its successful implementation, the
example was soon adopted by the Southern African Development
Community (SADC) in 1996 to become a blue-print for another 14 new
corridors, and again only a few years later in 2000 the member states of
the African Union's New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD)
took over the model to promote development corridors all over the
continent as a solution for prevailing economic and spatial disparities.
The last two decades saw the adoption of growth corridors in the
national development plans of many African countries. Prominent ex-
amples are the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania
(SAGCOT), which was launched as the backbone of Tanzania’s agri-
cultural transformation agenda of ‘agriculture first’(Kilimo Kwanza), or
the Lamu Port-South Sudan-Ethiopia Transport (LAPSSET) corridor as
part of Kenya’s Vision 2030. Corridor planning generally goes along
with the promise of win–win situations, i.e. the enhancement of eco-
nomic growth, income generation and improved well-being of the in-
habitants, and positive environmental effects. Corridor implementation
may, however, also be subject to sudden change, for which the recent
experience of SAGCOT is an interesting example.
At first sight, the mushrooming of development corridors in Africa
and other continents looks like an impressive success story of regional
planning and integration. After its first practical application in Europe,
the approach was implemented in Southern Africa and then adopted all
over the continent, and also in other emerging regions in the Global
South. The most spectacular example at the moment is the Chinese New
Silk Road project. This remarkable career can be taken as a typical
example of a ‘travelling model’, i.e. an idea or concept that was “in-
vented”for a particular purpose and geographical setting, and later
translated to other purposes and settings (Behrends et al., 2014).
However, I would argue, the adoption of that model for corridor-based
regional development initiatives all over Africa does not necessarily
prove that it has really been successful.
The numerous corridor projects across the continent have so far
been quite diverse with regard to their performance and current state of
implementation, with some projects apparently doing quite well, some
struggling with failure, and many not even getting beyond an early
stage of planning. Even if spatial integration and development have
positive economic impacts for the countries involved, they may also
have disadvantages for local populations (Paul and Steinbrecher, 2013).
Contrary to the initial goal of development corridors to ease spatial
inequalities, “there may be winners and losers along the corridor”
(Gálvez Nogales and Webber, 2017, 30).
Against this backdrop, some recent publications call for a new
generation of growth corridors that serve as “territorial tools for agro-
industry development”(Gálvez Nogales and Webber, 2017), value-
chain integration and the attraction of investment in public–private
partnerships as part of neoclassical spatial development initiatives
(Dannenberg et al., 2018). The role of transport infrastructure and
growth corridors for development is the object of controversial debates.
While development agencies and international financial organisations
like the World Bank see infrastructure and technologies as a pre-
requisite for development, critical voices rather view them as entry
points for the penetration of foreign capital (Murphy, 2008: 860). What
is critical about the implementation of development corridors and the
elaboration of national development strategies is the question of au-
thorship and ownership. The Kenyan newspaper Daily Nation (2015)
comments on this question: “While a national dream is conceived by
people, Vision 2030 was not conceived internally by Kenyans but ex-
ternally by McKinsey & Company of South Africa that has been con-
ceiving and selling ‘national visions’to African countries like Kenya.
Ours is Vision 2030, Rwanda's Vision 2020, Burundis's Vision 2025,
Tanzania's Vision 2025, and so forth.”As this comment points out,
foreign-produced visions are marginalizing African imaginations,
dominating local capacities to aspire, and conquering the future. De-
velopment corridors may be understood as “dreamscapes of modernity”
in the sense of Jasanoffand Kim (2015), but the modernity they envi-
sion is not necessarily the one imagined by the people living there.
5. Approaching geographies of the future
Development corridors are powerful tools of future-making in rural
Africa, because they appear attractive to investors, policy-makers, and
to some extent also to the wider public. They are presented and enacted
as ‘dreamscapes of modernity’, for example in maps, cartoons, and
drawings. What makes them problematic is the fact that they do not
originate from the needs and imaginations of their inhabitants, but from
foreign blueprints. Their design reflects ‘travelling models’, i.e., socio-
technical imaginaries that have originally been designed for other re-
gional and societal contexts and are now applied for the integration of
African peripheries into the global capitalist system.
However, this understanding of development corridors leaves some
questions open that require further studies. First, the fact that devel-
opment corridors have not been designed by local populations does not
necessarily mean that they are generally disadvantageous or against
local interests. By interpreting them as travelling models, I simply want
to draw the attention to the circumstances under which the model
‘travels’through contested fields of interest and multi-layered power
structures, and to the asymmetric power relations between the Global
North and South that determine the translation of such models into
space.
Second, I would like to raise the question what makes African fu-
tures or positions genuinely ‘African’. I have referred to positions of
post- and decoloniality that call for African visions and approaches of
future-making. Building upon a critique of Eurocentric historicism and
teleology, decolonial initiatives propose changes to the perspective of
theory-making to be an ‘ex-centric site’(Bhabha, 1994: 6). Yet, I think it
requires further clarification what makes theory (and the con-
ceptualization of development) actually be ‘from the South’, and what
gives this position more truth and legitimacy than others. Hence, I
suggest that we need to overcome North-South binaries from both di-
rections, which requires an ‘ex-centric’theory-making not only as
‘theory from’, but also ‘theory with the South’.
Third and my final point is that the future and its translation into
space should matter to (economic) geographers, especially in studies of
the relationship between the Global North and South. Along with the
need to understand the spatial dynamics of the diverse economies in the
Global South, there is also a need to appreciate ‘Southern’agency, and
the way how individuals and societies envision and shape their own
futures.
Acknowledgements
This paper was inspired by debates in the DFG-financed
Collaborative Research Center (CRC-TRR 228) “Future Rural Africa”.It
benefitted greatly from comments by the guest editors of this special
issue.
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