Abstracts accepted in English.
Alan Wiig
Elia Apostolopoulou
Han Cheng
Nikos Kapitsinis
Jonathan Silver
Alejandra Pizarro
The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), announced in 2013 by the Chinese President Xi Jinping is the single largest infrastructure project since the Marshall Plan. But China is by no means the only actor involved in the contemporary reworking of the global economy through infrastructure. From regional development banks and private equity firms, through to emerging plans by the US and EU and other trading blocs, to national planning authorities and logistical companies we are witnessing a new age of global infrastructure. These major investments are transforming built environments at speed: from railways, airports, ports, industrial parks, optical fiber networks, and special economic zones (SEZs), to smart cities, greenfield development, speculative real estate and commercial projects. There are hopes that these investments may create essential life-supporting infrastructures and services, contributing to poverty reduction and sustainability initiatives. However, place-based communities across the globe are increasingly contesting the loss of livelihoods, life-worlds and housing due to the intensification of land grabbing, displacement, and dispossession processes, causing concerns that the new era of global infrastructure and its socio-spatial and socio-environmental transformations unevenly and inequitably transforms geographies across multiple scales from the urban to rural and beyond.
Emerging grounded research has offered important insights that point to the unequal geographies of global infrastructure projects and the way places, natures and communities are profoundly affected. This includes empirical reflections on: land speculation and the uneven and gendered vulnerabilities for marginalized groups (e.g. women, migrant laborers) living and working in places where global infrastructure projects are materialised; the exclusion of vulnerable populations from mitigation programmes for infrastructure construction; the processes of accumulation, dispossession, and exploitation related to the privatization of strategic infrastructure; the intensification of labour precarity, worsening of working conditions, and violation of workers’ rights; the creation of logistical spaces, infrastructural hubs, industrial zones, manufacturing areas and commercial projects that alter both the local political situation and the geographies of everyday lives by, for instance, turning cities into industrial enclaves and transit corridors. Despite the importance of these analyses for unraveling emerging inequalities, critical geographical approaches focused on a comprehensive analysis of the links between global infrastructure transformation and inequality, including how the latter is differentiated along lines of class, gender and race, and an exploration of how different injustices are interconnected, require further debate and development. Further, a critical examination of global infrastructure’s trans-continental impact itself pushes critical scholars to think across and between these emergent geographies.