Kanai, J.M. orcid.org/0000-0002-4347-5175 and Schindler, S. (2022) Infrastructure-led development and the peri-urban question : furthering crossover comparisons. Urban Studies, 59 (8). pp. 1597-1617. ISSN 0042-0980
Abstract
Contemporary development policy portrays enhanced connectivity as the key to fostering economic growth in lagging regions. This global policy consensus and consequent infrastructure scramble have resulted in a proliferation of new urban spaces. These are dispersed, fragmentary and often unrecognised as urban by projects and plans centred on large-scale connective infrastructures to integrate remote regions into circuits of capital. Whilst our understanding of infrastructure-led development is informed by critical engagements with planetary urbanisation, global infrastructure and logistics, this position paper seeks to reconcile political economy analyses with situated studies closer to lived forms of heterogeneous precariousness in emerging urban worlds. Addressing recent debates that frame these bodies of scholarship as antagonistic, we emphasise the supplementarity of perspectives from within and beyond urban studies. This pluralism can be practised through comparisons that will (i) trace the geo-economic relationality of mega-infrastructures, which conditions directly and indirectly their planning, financing, construction and management, and (simultaneously or independently) (ii) examine difference in the diverse experiences of and responses to emergent infrastructural urbanisms of precarity. The article shows that genetic and generative comparisons can inform a research agenda on (peri-)urban precariousness, engaging policies with unmistakable global moorings but complex multi-scalar politics, diverging outcomes and situated resistances and appropriations.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2022 Urban Studies Journal Limited. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). |
Keywords: | comparative urbanism; East Africa; geographies of precarity; Latin America; planetary urbanisation |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Department of Geography (Sheffield) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number Economic and Social Research Council ES/R01096X/1 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 05 May 2022 10:47 |
Last Modified: | 16 Feb 2023 15:33 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | SAGE Publications |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1177/00420980211064158 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:186405 |