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- Convenors:
-
Natalia Buier
(University of Barcelona)
Cristiana Strava (Leiden University)
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- Discussant:
-
Marc Morell
(Rīgas Strādiņa Universitāte)
- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- SO-C497
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 14 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Stockholm
Short Abstract:
We address movement by looking at infrastructure development as a form of the circulation of capital through the built environment. We are interested in papers that analyse social phenomena that result from infrastructures' ability to join the movement of material resources and financial capital.
Long Abstract:
The financial crisis and the quest for higher returns on capital which accompanies it have lead, in the last years, to a veritable infrastructure rush. Contrary to mainstream assumptions about the ethereal nature of fictitious capital, its circulation through the built environment has resulted in an unprecedented pressure to expand a wide range of infrastructures. Whether we are looking at transport, energy or telecommunications infrastructures it becomes clear that overaccumulation in the financial economy translates into overproduction in the built environment.
This panel addresses the relationship between financialization and the circulation of capital through the built environment through the lens of infrastructural development. We are looking for contributions that engage with specific infrastructural projects and that seek to expand the theoretical debates in the anthropology of infrastructure. "Materiality" has been a central analytical category of the recent anthropology of infrastructure, yet it remains chronically undertheorized. This has important implications for the ethnography of infrastructure, since it limits anthropologists' ability to scale up from local, fragmented studies of infrastructure towards a historical anthropology of infrastructure and an unambiguous contribution to the ethnographic study of financial crises. We welcome contributions that explicitly engage with the relationship between finance and financialisation, infrastructure and the transformation of the environment, or between infrastructure materialities and the affective and political registers they produce or are associated with.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 14 August, 2018, -Paper short abstract:
This paper takes up the case of the Spanish high-speed rail project as a way to explore the interrelation between transport infrastructure, processes of accumulation and devaluation of the built environment and the increasing segregation of the mobility of labour and capital.
Paper long abstract:
Ciudad Valdeluz, hailed as Spain's first town built from scratch, is a new residential development built around the promise of hyper-connectivity offered by high-speed rail. The last twenty years have seen the expansion of Spain's high-speed rail network to the point of it becoming the longest HSR network in Europe. HSR has not only followed the revaluation of land, but it has also driven the recent processes of urbanization, as the case of Ciudad Valdeluz clearly shows. What most of the residents of places like Ciudad Valdeluz have experienced, however, is the impact of enforced mobility rather than the annihilation of distance. In this paper I take up the case of Ciudad Valdeluz in order to analyze the contradictions that characterize the new spaces of the transport system and their associated forms of mobility. HSR is, I argue, a fundamental resource for the absorption of excess capital and part and parcel of the new forms of urbanization that characterize the circulation of financial capital. It is also an instrument for completing the long-term process of devaluation of the industrial geography of Spain.
Paper short abstract:
The paper focuses on the symbolic role of infrastructural assets in moulding culture.
Paper long abstract:
Recently Poland has been living though a qualitatively new stage of its "catching-up" with the EU core countries. A financing avalanche came with the many-splendored thing of the EU funding, third country grants, and private investments. At the same time several multinationals took their chances to pursue cost-efficiency in a new European market in ways different from those of the wave of their predecessors (examined by Dunn 2004). Thus, varied infrastructure projects have developed under synergy and multiplication effects.
The paper is based on the fieldwork in one of the Polish IT-services hub cities that grasped its moment of quasi-affluence and subsidized growth. The creation of corporate infrastructure here ultimately set a path-dependency for secondary infrastructure sprawl, guided local environmental policy choices, and defined skilled labour movement patterns leading to what is suggested to conceive of as a flowerbed immigration policy model.
The analysis addresses the symbolic value of the materialized investments in how they enact (Soja 1999) and mediate cultural change (identity and belonging reconsideration, boundary-making, collective narrative fashioning or city branding). Given the velocity and steadiness of such change that sees grass-root monoculturalism combine with manifold exoticization at the backdrop of the hegemonization of the corporate narrative, the paper seeks to problematize adaptation to the new speeds of social transformations. Materiality is, therefore, explored through its societal effects and representations (Lefebvre 1974).
Paper short abstract:
This paper proposes to explore the link between the global movement of capital and emerging forms of governance through the case of Morocco's first high-speed rail project and the development corridor it is envisioned to be part of.
Paper long abstract:
Spectacular urban futures are being constructed at astounding and unprecedented rates in Morocco. In recent years the North African Kingdom has embarked on a series of ambitious billion-euro projects to overhaul the country's infrastructure on an exceptional scale. Capitalizing on the ongoing crises precipitated by the Arab Spring revolts in the region and its own comparative political and social stability, the Moroccan regime has been attracting global as well as regional investors with the promise of new 'mega projects' that aim to transform natural, economic and social landscapes.
Aptly described by Filip de Boeck (2011) as 'speculative and spectacular' visions of urban space, such building projects offer a unique vantage point for the study of how new regimes of value are produced through the increasing financialization of infrastructure - understood here as both the dominance of capital market financial systems, as well as the increasing political and economic power generated by the global movement of finance.
Taking the case of the projected Casablanca-Tangiers 'development corridor', this paper will zoom in on the high speed-rail (LGV) network meant to link the two future metropolises along the Atlantic coast. Set for inauguration in June of this year, the LGV's building is ideally poised to illuminate questions about how the movement of global capital is impacting local mobilities as well as participating in the production of emergent forms of governance.
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses the agrarian capitalism through an ethnographic research of a coffee village in China. Dragon-head enterprises and governmental projects influenced, but peasants cannot get profit from coffee plantation.
Paper long abstract:
China is a traditional agrarian country. Since1980s', The peasant economy graduates away and the rise of capitalism influences rural China. In 2004, the No.1 announcement of central government pointed out that dragon enterprise (longtou qiye) are encouraged for improving peasants' income. In 2013. The No.1 announcement of central government pointed out that government will encourage commercial enterprises to do business in rural China and develop agricultural industries and support the leading capital to the rural China (ziben xiaxiang) .Some scholars argue that the agricultural modernization and capital to the rural China could improve agricultural production and peasants could adapt to the market(An'gang Hu& Qungang wu,2001). The capital to the rural China is controlled by government in the form of governmental projects and invests, peasants sometimes cannot get equal profits from the capitalism (Haujuan Wang, 2015) . Some scholars argue that China should keep small-scale peasant economy, peasants cannot face to fluctuating change of fast modernization and they will lost land right. ( Yongjun An,2018)
This paper will zoom in the capital to the rural China policy(ziben xiaxiang), and take the case of coffee plantation renaissance in Zhukula; a remote village in the southwestern China, Yunnan. Central and local government supported Zhukula peasants to plant coffee trees and develop coffee tourism because zhukula has the longest coffee plantation history in China. The infrustrctures of Zhukula are indeed improve. But the peansants cannot get the profit from the projects.