Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the intertwinement of affects and latent materialities, exploring moral, temporal, and political dispositions emerging through engagements with a morphing urban landscape, in a post-revolutionary context.

Paper long abstract:

This paper deals with present engagements with projects of city renewal in Tunis. Like other cities in North Africa, Tunis has become the target of an accelerating form of speculative and spectacular urban development financed by Gulf countries. Promoted during the dictatorship of Ben Ali, and yet stalled during the Revolution, multi-million megaprojects are now back on the government's agenda and flagged as necessary to the process of post-revolutionary, democratic transition.

As such, eliciting both past and future imaginaries, these latent materialities catalyse ambivalent moral dispositions to Tunisian socio-political change. Based on twenty-four months of fieldwork in and around two megaprojects at the outskirts of Tunis, this presentation will examine states of temporal and moral ambivalence local inhabitants feel towards these renewed attempts at urban development, theoretically addressing the role of latent materialities in co-constructing affects, morals, and temporal imaginaries.