The promises and perils of infrastructure: Envisioning desirable futures in the Global South (1/2)

Abstract der Sitzung

The panel relates a focus on infrastructure with debates about desirables futures in the Global South. It invites contributors to examine desirable futures in infrastructure development of the Global South. Key questions are: What is ‘desirable’? For whom? How do people envision their own futures? Multiple overlapping planetary crises often render desirable transformations difficult to imagine. As real and impeding calamities narrow the range of possibility especially in the Global South, questions of what futures are desirable often take a backseat in public and personal imaginaries. This panel seeks to re-open this conversation by putting a particular focus on infrastructure developments in the Global South, which often form arenas in which possible and desirable futures are negotiated among a multitude of local, national and international actors (Müller-Mahn et al., 2021).

Infrastructure maintains a seemingly paradox position between utopic and dystopic visions of the future. The “promise of infrastructure” (Appel et al., 2018) is a central idea within the critical literature on infrastructure, most commonly in association with modernist visions of acceleration and seamless connectivity (Harvey & Knox, 2012). Infrastructure doesn’t only influence how the future can be imagined, but makes this imaginary possible in the first place (Aalders, 2020). Simultaneously, especially fossil fuel infrastructure is considered to create path-dependencies that lock-in unsustainable planetary futures that are literally unimaginable for the sheer dreadfulness. Infrastructure therefore embodies and symbolises the possibility to imagine desirable futures, as well as the impossibility to imagine any future at all.

Contributors are invited to examine this contradiction through both empirically informed as well as conceptual papers. We particularly encourage post-colonial perspectives on desirable infrastructure futures in the Global South that examine entanglements of future imaginaries with global power dynamics. Potential topics include, but are not limited to, questions such as:

• For whom are desirable futures truly desirable? How are (un‑)desirable futures negotiated in the arena provided by infrastructure projects in the Global South?
• What are specific power dynamics within these arenas that determine what kind of future is desirable and for whom? How do gendered, raced, and classed and other marginalised perspectives influence the perceptions of and actions towards desirable futures?
• What is the specific role of infrastructure projects – both completed and under construction – for either de- or increasing the “capacity to aspire” desirable futures? What is the relation between utopic and dystopic infrastructure futures?
• How is infrastructure used to promote global narratives of green futures and how are the very same negotiated on the ground?