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Infrastructure, time and labour: movement and suspension along the Abidjan-Lagos corridor
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As the social sciences undergo an infrastructural turn, geographers have taken steps to broaden, disrupt, and reconceptualise understandings of infrastructure and its relationship to social, political, economic, and ecological processes. We contribute to this discussion by highlighting the emergence of a comparatively understudied yet crucial aspect within infrastructural geographies-infrastructural labour. We identify key theoretical anchors that guide contemporary analyses of infrastructural labour, which we query by focusing on five key areas of scholarly discussion. Building on these, we offer a working definition of infrastructural labour to help guide further engagement and point to questions meriting additional investigation.
Invisible and seemingly technical financial infrastructures have become the site of high geopolitics. Crucially, security sanctions are being leveraged through the global financial messaging network SWIFT. This article offers the term “infrastructural geopolitics” to draw attention to the ways in which hegemonic contestation and fracturing play out in and through payment infrastructures. Infrastructures are not passive sites to be used in the service of preexisting hegemonic power but can themselves route, block, challenge, or rework power in particular ways.
We focus on the new trade mechanism INSTEX as a lens on the global battle over financial payment infrastructures. How and why has hegemonic contestation taken the shape of, and is in turn shaped by, struggles over payment infrastructure? As a heuristic device to analyze the hegemonic politics of financial infrastructure, we propose three terms that capture the processual nature of infrastructural politics: sedimentation, resurfacing, and fracturing. We apply these to the emergence of the payment infrastructure INSTEX. We explain how hegemonic politics become hardwired in the technical and largely invisible SWIFT infrastructure, which supported postwar financial order and sedimented its uneven power relations. The process of political resurfacing captures the ways in which infrastructural dispositions come to the surface of political discussion again, after 9/11 and through the JCPOA process. In conclusion, the introduction of INSTEX has advanced the possibility of fracturing international payment routes, with multiple alternative infrastructures emerging.
Corridors are central to contemporary processes of spatial reordering. On the African continent, they feature prominently in development planning at national, regional and continental scales. This article sheds light on the regional politics and supranational governance of cross-border corridors, aspects that have remained underrepresented in the burgeoning literature on corridors. Combining theoretical insights from the New Regionalism Approach and critical political geography and focusing on the ‘corridor agenda’ pursued by the Southern African Development Community (SADC), the article deconstructs dominant conceptions of corridors as archetypal spaces of flow and advances the argument that the spatial production and governance of cross-border corridors are contingent upon the compatibility of scalar and territorial articulations of state space. In the case of the Walvis Bay–Ndola–Lubumbashi Development Corridor, the incompatibility of Namibia’s decidedly regional ‘gateway strategy’ and Zambia’s (sub)national ‘pothole politics’ has yielded a connectivity patchwork. Efforts to institutionalize supranational corridor governance have been obstructed by state territoriality aimed at retaining political control over corridor space at the national scale. While commonly represented as spatial panaceas for attaining neoliberal meta-goals of global connectivity and seamless territorial integration, (trans)regional corridors are politically contested spaces that engender dialectical processes of de- and reterritorialization at various scales.
Propelled by a commodities boom and expanding South–South investment, mega-projects have reshaped the politics of labour in many African settings. Reflecting on such dynamics, this article critically engages with questions of employment, skills development, and contestation re-configuring capital–labour encounters in the ‘Chinese’ and ‘Brazilian’ workplace in Mozambique. We analyse two mega-projects: the Maputo Ring Road, implemented by the China Road and Bridge Corporation, and the Moatize Coal Project, led by the Brazilian mining company, Vale SA. Engaging with the complex realities at project ground level, the article unpacks how workplace regimes and outcomes reflect an intricate, multi-scalar array of spatial encounters, sector-specific characteristics, and national political economies. For both cases, this is associated with common promises of development and prosperity for Mozambique. While such promises take on different ideational guises, we show that the Chinese and Brazilian workplaces expose, nonetheless, overlapping patterns of inequality, contention, and hostility, reinforced by broader vulnerabilities and imbalances in global production networks and the Mozambican political economy. By providing a ground-level reading of the multi-scalar forces at play in the workplace, this article sheds light on the relationship between emerging South–South global encounters, national political realities, and labour geographies in African contexts shaped by mega-projects.
Focusing on the construction of Lamu Port as a focal point of the Lamu Port–South Sudan–Ethiopia Transport (LAPSSET) Corridor in Kenya, this article explores how megainfrastructures are entangled with processes of life-making and -unmaking, thus producing specific subject dispositions within a state’s infrastructural biopolitics as infrastructure-based capacitation and control of national populations. Analyzing sociopolitical effects of state-led megaprojects, civil society mobilization, and livelihoods of artisanal fishermen, the article develops a theoretical account of a politics of disavowal—a tacit denial of a state-admitted responsibility and support to vulnerable populations that, despite formal inclusion into the state’s development visions, are rendered constitutively absent within biopolitical spatialities of life advanced by the state. Thereby, the article triangulates the binary of bio- and necropolitics standardly deployed in multiple theorizations of (re)production of liberal capitalist life in geographical and interdisciplinary literatures on biopolitics, necropolitics, or politics of infrastructure. It specifically foregrounds how governance of vulnerable, expendable populations does not oscillate between intentional life- and death-making, flourishing and effacement, bio and necro but unfolds as a politics of disavowal—a confluence of formal recognition and material neglect by the state, expressed as a dialectic of presence and absence, inclusion and neglect.
This commentary advances “incompleteness” as an explanatory category for infrastructure processes that do not yield or conform to standard ideals, and a corrective to interventions that regard everything that does not appear to yield or conform as failed. Incompleteness offers a useful lens for approaching infrastructures through situated, contingent, and embodied dimensions. It permits a proper reading of infrastructure as transient, and infrastructure development as a process that is affected not solely by neoliberal interventions but also socio-material practices and inscriptions. As such, incompleteness transcends conventional and completist frames, and complements theorizations of infrastructure since Graham and Marvin’s Splintering Urbanism.
This work analyses the politics of anticipation and ensuing fears, tensions and conflicts in relation to Kenya’s Lamu Port-South Sudan-Ethiopia Transport (LAPSSET) Corridor which is to pass through several previously marginalized counties in the north of the country. Isiolo county, in the centre of Kenya is home to several different ethnic groups of whom some are perceived to be better informed about LAPSSET than others, or have certain advantages in terms of claims to indigeneity, ethno-political dominance, land tenure security or access to markets, which help them to position themselves accordingly. This anticipatory positioning – actions people take in anticipation of the future – is raising fears and heightening the claiming of land and ethnic boundary-making, leading to heightened tensions and exacerbating existing conflicts of which three specific cases are considered. We show how ethno-political divides on a national and regional level become effective at the local and county level, but at the same time, how the positioning of actors in anticipation of future investments impacts on ethnic boundary-making, as division lines are re-enacted and redrawn.
This article contributes an economic geography perspective on the envisioning and implementing of mega-infrastructure projects in Africa. Focusing on development corridors and their implicit spatio-temporality of “global integration,” we conceptualize corridors as spatial imaginaries for strategic coupling processes. We distinguish between emptying the future and claiming space as two fundamental mechanisms of spatial imaginaries. Together, these mechanisms can render crucial territorial and relational “insides” and “outsides” available for coupling processes. Spatial imaginaries are then sources of power in the coupling between corridor regions and global production networks.
Empirically, we focus on the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania (SAGCOT) in relation to the coupling process between global fertilizer manufacturer YARA International and the Tanzanian agricultural market. Facing unfavourable coupling conditions with Tanzania’s fertilizer sector, the early mobilization of SAGCOT served to promote a narrow imaginary of Tanzania’s agrarian future, thereby making a soft claim to territorial (through the corridor) and networked space (through a network of corridor stakeholders). Although YARA and Tanzanian counterparts initially capitalized on SAGCOT’s mobilization due to its promise to transform Tanzanian agriculture, a gradual disenchantment with SAGCOT’s vision and its subsequent disintegration jeopardizes these coupling process today.
Approaching corridors as spatial imaginaries reveals therefore their instrumental but fragile power in coupling processes. Such power is not about blunt domination or coercion, but rather builds on persuasion and consent. Only when spatial imaginaries succeed in maintaining persuasive arguments about the future, is their function of initiating and stabilizing otherwise unfavourable coupling processes available.
Megaprojects are returning to play a key role in the transformation of rural Africa, despite controversies over their outcome. While some view them as promising tools for a ‘big push’ of modernization, others criticize their multiple adverse effects and risk of failure. Against this backdrop, the paper revisits earlier concepts that have explained megaproject failures by referring to problems of managerial complexity and the logics of state-led development. Taking recent examples from Kenya, the paper argues for a more differentiated approach, considering the symbolic role infrastructure megaprojects play in future-oriented development politics as objects of imagination, vision, and hope. We propose to explain the outcomes of megaprojects by focusing on the ‘politics of aspiration’, which unfold at the intersection between different actors and scales. The paper gives an overview of large infrastructure projects in Kenya and places them in the context of the country´s national development agenda ‘Vision 2030′. It identifies the relevant actors and investigates how controversial aspirations, interests and foreign influences play out on the ground. The paper concludes by describing megaproject development as future making, driven by the mobilizing power of the ‘politics of aspiration’. The analysis of megaprojects should consider not only material outcomes but also their symbolic dimension for desirable futures.
“People as Infrastructure” was a concept deployed by the author in a 2004 publication of Public Culture. This essay returns to this notion following widespread use across the urban studies community, and attempts to find new dimensions of applicability not considered in the original publication. These are rooted in an exploration of a techno-poetics of urbanism, the continuous and oscillating relationships between human agencies and technicity, and the subsequent need to reimagine the basic terms of urban collective life.
Recent studies on ‘urban informality’ stress the role of the state in the production and governing of ‘gray spaces’. This paper contributes to this body of research by emphasising the multiple actors involved in the governance of informal land uses and their ambiguous positions on how these spaces should best be understood and approached. Based on an in-depth case study of ‘gray’ trading spaces in central Accra, I show that individual landowners in the vicinity of trading spots play a crucial role in the governing of roadside trading, together with state actors and traders. Furthermore, traders and state actors are both engaged in ambiguous ‘worlding practices’ that, on the one hand, envision Accra as becoming a city where street trade is eradicated, while, on the other hand, street trade is considered to be an opportunity for urban (economic) development. These varied perspectives imply that neither traders nor state bodies are uniform actors and that these groups are not necessarily positioned against each other.
This article explores colonial (dis-)continuities between the planned Lamu Port–South Sudan–Ethiopia Transport (LAPSSET) development corridor and the Uganda Railway (UR). The historical approach to infra-structure studies highlights the effects of large-scale infrastructures beyond their immediate material impact, and reveals their potential power to structure mobilities, historicities and politics of scale. With reference to relational theories, it is argued that the two projects gain their respective significance not only through their ability to connect distant places, but also by blocking and severing other competing ways of being mobile. Particularly, both infrastructure projects create tech-nologies enabling easier and faster flow of capital and commodities but limit previously prevalent mobilities practised by caravans and semi-no-madic people in the region. Both projects, furthermore, produce par-ticular ways of remembering the past and anticipating the future. The article identifies a major discontinuity in the politics of scale they respec-tively imply: while the UR aimed at producing a clear scalar hierarchy between empire and colony, the LAPSSET alleges to dissolve hard boundaries between scalar instances. This article is based on qualitative data collected during fieldwork along the proposed route of the LAPSSET corridor, as well as archive work regarding the UR.
In this paper we combine infrastructure studies and black radical traditions to foreground how imperial remains deeply inform the logics that bring forth contemporary large‐scale infrastructures in Africa. The objective, prompted by the ongoing avid promotion of such architectures on the continent, is to contribute to an analysis that centres race in these projects. Our argument is that these initiatives have to be understood in relation to inherited material and discursive scaffoldings that remain from the colonial period, through what we refer to as imperial remains and imperial invitations. These remains and invitations demonstrate how recent mega infrastructures inhere, in their planning, financing and implementation, a colonial racialism, despite rhetorical claims to the opposite. Empirically, we draw, principally, on China built and financed infrastructure projects from Kenya, and theoretically upon black radical traditions in order to foreground a longer genealogy of black pathologising and resistance to it on the continent.
In much of Eastern Africa, the last decade has seen a renewed interest in spatial development plans that link mineral exploitation, transport infrastructure and agricultural commercialisation. While these development corridors have yielded complex results – even in cases where significant investments are yet to happen – much of the existing analysis continues to focus on economic and implementation questions, where failures are attributed to inappropriate incentives or lack of ‘political will’. Taking a different – political economy – approach, this article examines what actually happens when corridors ‘hit the ground’, with a specific interest to the diverse agricultural commercialisation pathways that they induce. Specifically, the article introduces and analyses four corridors – LAPSSET in Kenya, Beira and Nacala in Mozambique, and SAGCOT in Tanzania – which are generating ‘demonstration fields’, economies of anticipation and fields of political contestations respectively, and as a result, creating – or promising to create – diverse pathways for agricultural commercialisation, accumulation and differentiation. In sum, the article shows how top-down grand-modernist plans are shaped by local dynamics, in a process that results in the transformation of corridors, from exclusivist ‘tunnel’ visions, to more networked corridors embedded in local economies, and shaped by the realities of rural Eastern Africa.
Financial flows into Africa are being reoriented through the pervasive discourse of the ‘infrastructure gap’. I argue that the generation of new infrastructures identified as ‘alternative assets’ by global finance is also creating landscapes of opportunity for urban capital accumulation by more locally-embedded actors. Thus, as international financial flows are becoming ‘infrastructuralized’, domestic capital is increasingly ‘real-estatized’. The conceptualization of African urban economies in terms of deficits has obscured the extent to which they are also characterised by surfeits, including of certain kinds of property development and speculation, with important implications for the politics of urban accumulation, dispossession and violence.
This final report highlights the increasing attention to precarity, including academic precarity, within geography. After briefly discussing the implications for approaches to agency, I argue for attention to debates about racialized and racial capitalism from labour geographers. I suggest that theorizations of racial capitalism emerge from particular standpoints, and that geographers are well placed to explore racial capitalisms in a plural sense if we are willing to grapple with the standpoints from which we theorize in labour geography itself. I draw on the ‘infrastructural turn’ to illustrate how labour geographers can start to think with relational approaches to racial capitalism.
This article responds to a preference for short‐term history in research on the infrastructure turn by engaging with the longue durée of East Africa’s latest infrastructure scramble. It traces the history of LAPSSET in Kenya and the Central Corridor in Tanzania, revealing the coloniality of new and improved transport infrastructure along both corridors. This exercise demonstrates how the spatial visions and territorial plans of colonial administrators get built in to new infrastructure and materialise in ways that serve the interests of global capital rather than peasant and indigenous peoples being promised more modern, prosperous futures. The article concludes by suggesting that a focus on the longue durée also reveals uneven patterns of mobility and immobility set in motion during the colonial scramble for Africa and reinforced after independence. These “colonial moorings” are significant as they shape political reactions to new mega‐infrastructure projects today and constrain the emancipatory potential of infrastructure‐led development.
Infrastructures have proven to be useful focal points for understanding social phenomena. The projects of concern in this literature are often considered complete or, if not, their materialization is assumed to be imminent. However, many—if not most—of the engineered artifacts and systems classified as infrastructure exist in states aptly characterized as unbuilt or unfinished. Bringing together scholarship on unbuilt and unfinished infrastructures from anthropology, architecture, geography, history, and science and technology studies, this article examines the ways in which temporalities articulate as planners, builders, politicians, potential users, and opponents negotiate with a project and each another. We develop a typology of heuristics for analyzing the temporalities of the unbuilt and unfinished: shadow histories, present absences, suspended presents, nostalgic futures, and zombies. Each heuristic makes different temporal configurations visible, suggesting novel research questions and methodological approaches.
This article analyses the production, circulation and consumption of cement along the West African coastal corridor, a 500-kilometre conurbation that stretches between Accra, Lomé, Cotonou and Lagos – the largest urban metropolis still in progress in Africa. By focusing on the ‘cement chain’, this research contributes to ongoing explorations of how urban phenomena are produced in Africa. As a binding material, cement is at the nexus of a range of issues at stake in contemporary African cities, such as urban policies, economic trends, dweller practices, environmental issues and capitalist accumulation. Based on empirical long-term fieldwork, the article adopts a ‘follow-the-thing’, multi-scale approach, retracing the itinerary of cement bags from the plant to the plot and observing all the actors involved in the cement chain, from major companies to bricklayers. Cement, the article concludes, epitomises the emerging ‘Made in Africa’ metropolitan condition, therefore including issues regarding the environment and sustainability in current debates on the growth of the cement city.
Infrastructure has gone from being yesterday's news to a focal point of development cooperation, particularly in Africa. While the list of development challenges that infrastructure is assumed to improve keeps expanding, projects are simultaneously criticised for not yielding the expected broader development effects. What is it about infrastructure that holds such high promises of development? Has this changed between the post-independence period of large infrastructure investments in Africa and the investment boom currently underway – and if so, how? In this article, I examine the differences between how infrastructure investments are understood and implemented in this most recent turn, as compared to some decades ago. I find a similar development focus between the two periods, with a strong concentration around economic growth. Moreover, little has changed in project focus, despite a more diverse set of actors on board with the ‘infrastructure-induced development’ narrative. I use inter-boom processes to explain why the challenges related to weak capacities in domestic construction sectors have continued. The analysis further shows how infrastructure investment has taken centre stage because it manages to satisfy the interests of a range of different actors.
From U.S.-Mexico border walls to Flint's poisoned pipes, there is a new urgency to the politics of infrastructure. Roads, electricity lines, water pipes, and oil installations promise to distribute the resources necessary for everyday life. Yet an attention to their ongoing processes also reveals how infrastructures are made with fragile and often violent relations among people, materials, and institutions. While infrastructures promise modernity and development, their breakdowns and absences reveal the underbelly of progress, liberal equality, and economic growth. This tension, between aspiration and failure, makes infrastructure a productive location for social theory. Contributing to the everyday lives of infrastructure across four continents, some of the leading anthropologists of infrastructure demonstrate in The Promise of Infrastructure how these more-than-human assemblages made over more-than-human lifetimes offer new opportunities to theorize time, politics, and promise in the contemporary moment.
Many African governments have embraced centralised spatial planning and the construction of large-scale connective infrastructure as a means to synergise industrialisation and functional urban development. This article examines the tensions between these economic and urban development objectives in Ghana and Kenya. Infrastructure-led development in both cases has fuelled extended and unplanned urbanisation and the production of new frontiers for real estate investment. However, the evidence indicates that it has failed to contribute to processes of structural transformation. This argument advances debates about the tensions between supply chain and rentier capitalism and problematises the assumed relationship between infrastructure-led development and industrialisation.
This paper critically analyses Africa’s ‘Ports Race’, the massive increase in port infrastructure investment taking place across the continent since the mid-2000s. It argues that the phenomenon shapes, and is shaped by, three interconnected trends: (1) an emerging material–political–institutional lock-in to a new extractivist paradigm of capital accumulation; (2) continental governments’ growing embrace of state-led development strategies; and (3) the repackaging of globalized discourses of connectivity and idealized visions of modernity by elites to legitimize both their own political positions and what are often exploitative and environmentally destructive practices/processes. Taken together, these developments point to novel configurations of engagement playing out across the continent between transnational capital and political elites.
The twentieth anniversary of Splintering Urbanism’s publication is an apropos moment to consider the significance of time in, and for, critical infrastructure studies. This commentary brings Splintering Urbanism into dialogue with Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis to explore how time and temporality can (re)frame, extend, and challenge how we engage and analyze the networked metropolis. As an empirical concern, conceptual framework, and methodological approach, “infrastructure time” discloses commonalities and contradictions emerging across the infrastructure turn, enriching our understanding of the production of infrastructure space and helping us pose questions about urbanization, urban politics, and the urban condition in new and generative ways.
With China's rise to become Africa's largest bilateral creditor, much research has focused on an evidence-based critique of the politicised narrative about China's supposed ‘debt trap diplomacy'. At a more fundamental level, this debate problematises the function of debt and related power differentials in late capitalism and calls into question development paradigms, notably the hegemonic infrastructure-led development regime, that have sustained Africa's financial dependency into the 2020s. As the International Monetary Fund is yet again shuttling between Addis Ababa, Lusaka, and Nairobi to resurrect fiscal discipline and to ensure debtor compliance for the post-pandemic ‘payback period', it is argued that (i) periodic cycles of debt financing, debt distress and structural adjustment are a systemic feature of the malintegration of Africa into the global capitalist economy, and (ii) critical research on the social costs and economic beneficiaries of renewed rounds of austerity and privatisation in Africa’s current debt cycle is needed.
This paper, based on historical and contemporary dynamics of railway infrastructures in Kenya, analyses how mega-infrastructures are central in state practices of infrastructural territorialisation – an infrastructure-based production of territoriality as a historically and geographically specific form of spatio-political order and organisation, imbued with social tensions, stemming from the state-led imposition of a techno-politics onto its territory. Focusing on territorial and political objectives of the state advanced through the Uganda Railway and the Standard Gauge Railway, the paper demonstrates how both of these projects have been central in colonial and contemporary practices of infrastructural territorialisation, albeit in mercurial ways that do not fully represent original techno-political intensions of the state. This discussion, first, highlights how megaprojects – although primarily analysed by recent geographical scholarship as advancing contemporary geographies of global capitalism – also contingently coalesce with state (re)territorialisation practices. Second, undertaking these analyses in the Kenyan context, the paper shows how, despite shared historical dynamics of contingent state territorialisation – and the reconstitution of racial and socio-economic inequalities, advanced through megaprojects that in Kenya are socially interpreted through historical experiences of colonialism – current infrastructural territorialisations are also different; whilst the colonial territorialisation of Kenya emerged as relatively unchallenged, its present state territory-making is undermined by both the global character of megaprojects and the external actors that the state relies on for its practices of infrastructural territorialisation.
The Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) in Kenya, inaugurated in 2017, has been promoted by the Kenyan government as a promise of “development” and “prospering people”. This article demonstrates how, contrary to these narratives, the SGR reiterates the pre‐existing relations of difference mediated by class, geography, and ethnicity. Focusing on material and semiotic forms of the SGR infrastructures, it specifically shows how the railway project functions as the techno‐politics of differentiation that governs by including “prospering publics” of urban middle classes into Kenya’s modernist development vision, providing unstable hopes for “development” to more precarious peri‐urban and rural “anticipating populations”, but simultaneously constituting “excluded populations” in rural landscapes that are denied the possibility of being a part of the national modernist development vision. Highlighting this intimate relationship between infrastructure, governance, and biopolitics, the article demonstrates that mega‐infrastructures – differentiating between the publics included in, and the populations excluded from, the state’s development visions and practices, as well as unstable subjective dispositions in‐between – engender modalities of non‐belonging that fall outside of (inherently liberal) frames of “citizenship” or a “public” frequently employed in critical infrastructure scholarship.
This article presents a long-term explanation of port evolution in Africa. It focuses on the economic, political and social characteristics that influenced the development of maritime infrastructures and their interaction with inland transport systems. This article demonstrates how seaport evolution in Africa has been heavily affected by path-dependence patterns. In addition, this study provides evidence of the insertion of the African economy into the waves of globalization through the modernization of seaports and the necessary institutional and technological flexibility.
In order to advance the emerging research on development corridors, this paper, drawing on the geographical, as well as broader critical social science, literatures on infrastructure, offers three different pathways how research on large‐scale infrastructural projects could be conceptually developed. Using the example of LAPSSET in Kenya, the paper discusses how imaginaries and material practices of development corridors could be understood: as (1) practices of establishing frontiers of extractive capital accumulation, that (2) create fragmented forms of state territoriality characterised by complex interaction between the state and private actors, and (3) through ideals of “modernity” valorise some lives over others. Although not exhaustive, taken together, these approaches demonstrate that development corridors, are not just material practices of infrastructural development that translate into sustainable economic growth and development, as advocated by “win‐win” mainstream development discourses. Instead, the approaches outlined in the article demonstrate that development corridors are value‐laden practices that play a specific function in creating and sustaining socio‐political orders increasingly dominated by global capitalist expansion, as well as different forms of extraction, state‐private actor assemblages and normative ordering of life that the constitution of these orders sets in motion. Through these analyses, the article contributes to the geographical scholarship on mega‐infrastructures by indicating how the globally structured politics of infrastructure – such as development corridors – advance capitalist expansion by materialising not just in urban or peri‐urban contexts, as is common to focus within the literature, but also play an important role in producing geographies of states, characterised by extractivism, contested territorialities and normative ordering of life.
This paper argues that infrastructure-led development constitutes an emergent international development regime whose imperative is to ‘get the territory right’. Spatial planning strategies from the post-war era are increasingly employed in contemporary attempts to integrate territory with global networks of production and trade. Large-scale infrastructure projects link resource frontiers and subnational urban systems – oftentimes across national borders – in ways that constitute spatially articulated value chains geared toward the extraction of resources, logistical integration and industrial production. The paper charts the emergence of this regime, analyses its spatial manifestations and evaluates its developmental outcomes.
The large-scale infrastructure projects being implemented in the East African Community (EAC) region portray signs of postmodernism especially as a reaction to and disenchantment with the development models adopted by African countries till the 1980s. Whereas the past model of high modernism focused on transforming national economies through implementation of large-scale infrastructure projects, the current thinking in the EAC focuses on fast tracking not only national development but also regional integration and realizing Pan-African continental connectivity for sustainable development. The projects, however, manifest a competitive race amongst the partner states and subscribe to the African Renaissance mantra but push countries into debt entrapment and protracted dependency. Postmodern Pan-Africanism ought to incorporate ‘African content’ in the whole process of infrastructure development. The region’s transport corridors host infrastructure projects that show signs of a paradigm shift from the historical structure of exchange to an integrated regional mode of social and economic exchange. Infrastructure development is contextualized from a historical perspective that locates the viability of the Central, Northern and LAPSSET (Lamu Port–South Sudan–Ethiopia–Transport) Corridors in Pan-African connectivity, sustainable development and self-reliance.
In recent years, following the discovery of huge coal reserves in the province of Tete, Mozambique, there has been an increasing rush of global capital into the province. This interest in the mining industry has resulted in the creation of enclaves and spaces of enclosure that entrench the existing class differences further by integrating small groups into global circuits of production whilst subjecting others to dispossession. These dynamics of contemporary capitalist expansion across Sub-Saharan Africa have been analysed in the literature on neoliberal enclaves as exclusionary spaces of extraction and capital accumulation.
This paper contributes to this scholarship. It focuses on the resettlement site of Cateme that was built to accommodate the populations dispossessed by the neoliberal mining enclave in Tete, and highlights how the space of Cateme constituted through the dispossession from this enclave is characterised by extreme forms of socio-economic marginalisation. Through this discussion, the paper demonstrates how neoliberal enclaves, rather than just being exclusionary spaces of extraction as observed in the literature, ought to be analysed as interacting in complex ways with broader socio-economic landscapes of host countries, through which they create spaces of suffering and entrench the existing class differences beyond their own spaces of extraction and accumulation.