The Material Geographies and Political Ecologies of Infrastructure-led Development

Continent spanning, ocean-crossing infrastructure and trade corridors have (re)emerged as a defining feature of global economic change since at least the 2008 financial crisis. Of the many extended infrastructure in planning, under construction, or in use, those associated with China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) are prominent across Asia, Africa, Europe, Latin America and beyond, delineating new global trade relations, agendas, flows and movements. At the same time, these BRI infrastructures are also driving urban growth and transformation, in turn generating new questions about inequality, power and politics in the city. This process that we have termed ‘Silk Road urbanism” (Wiig and Silver, 2019) and “infrastructure‐led, authoritarian neoliberal urbanism” (Apostolopoulou, 2020) is also exacerbating socio-spatial division and environmental degradation. Silk Road urbanization may then be generating new potentials to displace and disenfranchise urban populations, whilst empowering authoritarian governance agendas, new processes of capitalist accumulation and state-driven dispossession.

This panel session proposes that understandings of Silk Road urbanization necessitatecross-border analysis that compares the diverse effects of BRI-driven infrastructure corridors and the lived experiences of urban dwellers facing these transformations within, across, and between distinct cities. Given the scale, scope, and sheer size of the Belt and Road Initiative, we think that a range of geographical approaches need to be brought into conversation as a growing literature begins to coalesce into a sub-field that incorporates geo-political and world economic analysis, with new ideas on urbanization, everyday experiences and technological transformations. As such we have organised this panel to facilitate a conversation across and beyond Geography concerning the BRI and its relationship to urban transformation.

Part 1 asks participants to a) reflect on different theoretical approaches to the geography of the Belt and Road Initiative from particular analytic perspectives (i.e. geopolitics and geo-economics, development studies, political ecology, science-technology studies, etc.) and then b) answer the question: what do geographers interested in the BRI need to know to effectively study the way these infrastructure and trade corridors drive urban transformation?

Part 2 brings together scholars studying aspects of ‘Silk Road urbanism’ more directly to compare across and between cities, research foci, grounded analytic strategies, and epistemological intent. We ask participants to reflect on: how do we account for the variety of situated, lived experiences and complex local realities ongoing within or alongside BRI-driven urban transformation? Can we talk about an emerging Silk Road urbanization and how this would be defined and described? What kind of urban formations, urban politics, and urban processes do we observe that are distinct to the New Silk Road?