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Paper short abstract:

In this context of program implementation: "major road infrastructure projects", the Ila Touba toll motorway constitutes a major political and economic stake. However, this space event maker in a part of the old groundnut basin is causing concern among agro-pastoralists and transhumant pastoralists.

Paper long abstract:

In this context of program implementation: "major road infrastructure projects", the Ila Touba toll motorway constitutes a major political and economic stake. However, this space event maker in a part of the old groundnut basin with high peasant densities is causing concern among agro-pastoralists and transhumant pastoralists. This article is based on several research studies carried out in Senegal and abroad. Based on survey data and field observations, the article intends to offer a new interpretation of the landscape tested by the effects of this

highway. In short, this reflection raises questions about the destructuring effects operated by this infrastructure: changes in spatial relationships and agrarian practices; the adjustment methods operated by the peasants and transhumant herders and the isolation of a fringe of these lands.

Keywords: Ila Touba highway; space event maker; Old groundnut basin; transhumant pastoralists; agro-pastoralists; agrarian landscape; destructuring effects.

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Paper short abstract:

I argue that the imagination and construction of a mega infrastructure project in Lephalale, a South African town, inspired a scramble for land that highlights the limits of land use policies in an area characterized by property speculation and extractivism as the two main modes of accumulation.

Paper long abstract:

Mega infrastructure projects, especially in Africa, have come to define national developmental ideology and global policy agendas (Enna and Bersaglio, 2020: 103). These projects have taken various forms from large energy infrastructures to smart cities, and have been positioned as necessary for addressing uneven development. In countries where the extractive industry is the mainstay of the economy, these projects are largely linked to the industry in some form or another. For instance, in South Africa, where mining remains the largest contributor to the country’s GDP, a large proportion of infrastructure projects have focused on the exploitation of existing coal fields, tied to other infrastructure goals such as sustainable human settlements. As this paper demonstrates, the case of Medupi Coal Power station in Lephalale was positioned as one such project, promising not only the end of the electricity crisis but as well as positioning the town and region as an economic zone and a vision of a new post-apartheid city. This spurred interest from various actors who wanted a stake in the burgeoning town. I argue that the imagination and construction of the project inspired a scramble for land that highlights the limits of land use policies in an area characterized by property speculation and extractivism as the two main modes of accumulation.

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Paper short abstract:

The adoption of export-oriented policies and development corridors led to the inflow of investments and land-use changes in rural Mozambique. The research uses remote sensing imagery to identify impacted areas and correlates visible landscape changes driven by the arrival of international capital.

Paper long abstract:

Starting in the ’90s, Mozambique has been adopting export-oriented policies aimed at attracting international extractivist capital. The process accelerated at the end of the first decade of the year 2000 with the implementation of the Nacala Corridor and Prosavana program, including the concession of mining sites and logistics to private enterprises, together with strategies to facilitate the arrival of agro-industrial companies. Although resistance movements and international conditions have altered some of the planned implementations, significant impacts on the socio-territorial fabric of the region had occured. The consequences of these arrivals are disputed, contrasting peasants’ rights violations, infrastructure implementation, and economic growth. This research uses spatial analysis to assess changes and relationships between human activities and land use modifications, correlating changes in land-use intensity, emission of lights, and abrupt land cover changes in specific hotspots along the Nacala Corridor. Hence, supporting the efforts to understand the impact of massive land deals in urban settlements, possible push-pull factors of capital and labor, and trends led by infrastructure implementation in rural Africa.

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Paper short abstract:

Many infrastructure projects in Africa are driven by visionary promises, but are also characterized by delays and false starts. This paper presents a case study that shows how ordinary Kenyans build their futures from ruins and rubble of suspended construction projects.

Paper long abstract:

From mega-projects to small-scale repairs, many construction projects in Kenya are characterized by delays and false starts. One such case is the famous Kamariny stadium, where since the 1950s world-class long-distance runners have prepared for international races. Part of government’s vision to develop Kenya into a “globally competitive and prosperous country”, the project promised to turn old athletics tracks into an imposing modern stadium. However, the construction was started and then suspended, leaving behind rubble, ruins, and scattered materials. These are material starting points for Kenyans’ engagement with the future – enchantment, fear, anticipation, disruption, waiting – and represent both possibilities and anxieties about state-driven development of infrastructure. Such ambiguities and contradictions are, I argue, not simply a result of the projects’ construction, but rather of their suspension (Gupta 2018) – between the projects' proverbial beginnings and ends, but also between promises of a modernist future and material realities of a ruinous present. Suspension as ethnographic observation and analytical framework condenses the key tension of contemporary vision-driven development in Kenya and beyond: the one between promises of progress and modernization and possibilities of failure and exclusion. I argue for an ethnographic approach to infrastuctural development in Africa that looks beyond the more obvious focus on mega-projects or urban hotspots, and that highlights how ordinary citizens deal with contradictions between visionary promises and material uncertainties. Analysts should focus on suspension’s rubble and ruins in order to understand development and future-making in Africa beyond simplistic narratives of rising and abjection.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper reviews the effects of donor-financed infrastructure on state-society relations in one district of rural Ethiopia. It demonstrates that building infrastructure does not straightforwardly strengthen state reach and can undermine it, even in a context of relative state strength.

Paper long abstract:

This paper complements studies of infrastructure megaprojects by reviewing the micro-level effects of infrastructure construction on state-society relations in the context of a development intervention in rural Ethiopia. The Merhabete Integrated Rural Development Project (MIRDP), implemented by the German NGO Menschen für Menschen (MfM) in one district of Amhara region from 1988-2009, built a large range of infrastructure from roads, school blocks, clinics and a hospital to a network of project offices which were handed to the state on project closure. The paper reviews the effects of infrastructure construction on state reach, understood in both material and ideational terms. It argues that MIRDP infrastructure was incorporated into Ethiopian party-state strategies of increasing its reach into society. MIRDP works became part of an apparatus of control which was intended to pursue the party-state’s developmental goals (e.g. expanding primary healthcare and education) but also its political goals (maintaining party hegemony and repressing dissent).

The paper also demonstrates that the processes by which infrastructure affects state reach are far from straightforward. Early on in the intervention, the state struggled with MfM’s decision to implement the project with its own development agents, its own offices and residences, largely bypassing state structures. Later, after the intervention closed, state visibility was weakened by the presence of crumbling infrastructure, built by the project, which the state could not maintain. The paper argues that the effects of donor-built infrastructure on state-society relations are complex, and that it is important to consider material and ideational aspects of this relationship.

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Paper short abstract:

This study examines nomadic women's understudied experiences with Mega projects, notably Tanzania's Turkish-built Standard Gauge Railway (SGR), by uncovering these women's untold stories and provides a comprehensive picture of their experiences through in-depth interviews and narrative analysis.

Paper long abstract:

This qualitative research study examines nomadic women's understudied experiences with large-scale infrastructure projects, notably Tanzania's Turkish-built Standard Gauge Railway (SGR). Large infrastructure projects, like railways, might affect pastoral populations, especially women. These initiatives generally acquire large tracts of marginal pastoralist land, which might displace or constrain grazing communities . These projects may disproportionately affect women, who manage resources, care for families, and operate households, according to literature.

This study seeks to analyse pastoralist women's SGR experiences and identify compensation and involvement/ participation methods that reduce negative consequences and promote sustainable development. Turkey is building the Tanzanian SGR, unlike Kenya, Ethiopia, and Djibouti. This study will compare Turkey's SGR experience with other countries' local community participation and compensation .

The research will interview and focus group pastoralist women and other stakeholders to learn how their lifestyle and the SGR affect them. Pastoralist women's experiences and best practises will be thematically studied. This research will also illuminate nomadic women's complex experiences with large-scale infrastructure projects.

This research will inform the development rights and empowerment of underprivileged populations. It will also help policymakers, practitioners, and other stakeholders planning and designing inclusive, egalitarian, and sustainable large-scale infrastructure projects in pastoralist communities. This study seeks to challenge dominant narratives and promote inclusive and equitable development by giving nomadic women a voice.

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Paper short abstract:

Many new roads have recently been built in Lusaka (Zambia). Through studying one fly-over bridge, this paper aims to show how vendors’ everyday lives are changed by these developments, and how they adjust their practices, including relocation and reappropriation of spaces surrounding the bridge.

Paper long abstract:

Many governments on the African continent have engaged in the construction of new road infrastructures. Within urban areas, new road infrastructures may contribute to city governments’ aims to create a ‘world-class city’. Up to date little is known about the effects of new road infrastructures on urban dwellers generally, and on those residing or working in the vicinity of these projects. Through studying street vendors in Lusaka (Zambia), this paper aims to increase our understanding of how urban dwellers working in the vicinity of such project have been affected, and reappropriated new infrastructures in order to sustain their livelihoods. The paper builds on fieldwork conducted during 2022 in Lusaka during which interviews have been conducted with the city government, street vendors and other state institutions involved in the building of roads within the city. In Lusaka, approximately 500 kilometers of roads have been created, upgraded or improved during the last decade. One of the most visible improvements of the roads have included the creation of several fly-over bridges on central access roads to the city’s CBD, as part of the Lusaka Decongestion Project. This paper studies how the in 2020 finalized Makeni fly-over bridge has altered possibilities for street vendors to sustain their livelihoods in the vicinity of the bridge. Preliminary findings suggest that many (mobile) street hawkers have relocated to other locations in the city, while other (stationary) vendors have adjusted their vending practices (i.e. location, working hours, products, etc.) in order to remain within the Makeni area.

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Paper short abstract:

In this paper I will analyze the lived experiences of Abidjan’s inhabitants who have to cope with destruction and displacement with regard to large-scale infrastructure projects, and the struggle for recognition and visibility related to the politics of infrastructure in Abidjan.

Paper long abstract:

For many inhabitants of North-Abidjan, large-scale infrastructure projects such as the Fourth Bridge construction project and the metro construction project are in the first instance experienced through destruction and displacement, while the developmental promise of infrastructure and “émergence” associated with these projects remains out of reach for many. In my PhD research I analyze how residents inhabit the spaces and times in between destruction and development, and propose to look at eviction as a socially navigated process and struggle in which residents have to cope with multiple socio-infrastructural, affective and temporal displacements over many years. In this paper I will draw on seventeen months of multi-sited fieldwork from 2019 to 2022 in different neighborhoods of North-Abidjan that were evicted or partly destroyed for large-scale infrastructure projects such as Boribana (Attécoubé), Quartier Mairie (Adjamé) and Mossikro (Yopougon). I will focus specifically on the lived experiences, temporalities and practices of inhabitants in these impacted neighborhoods as they attempt to cope with the precarities, displacements and tensions that come with living in between destruction and development. Additionally, I engage with the work of long-time collaborator Sekou Sylla, the president of a local NGO who defends the rights of Abidjan’s precarious and displaced populations and who was also recently evicted from his home in Mossikro to make way for the Fourth Bridge. Thus I also wish to draw attention more generally to the negotiations, aspirations and struggle for recognition and visibility that underlie the micro-politics of infrastructure and displacement in Abidjan.

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Paper short abstract:

Ce papier analyse la manière dont les expulsions inopinées dans les quartiers populaires affectent les conditions de vie des victimes, surtout en l'absence de tout programme d'accompagnement.

Paper long abstract:

Les principales villes béninoises sont soumises, depuis 2016, à un renouveau des pratiques d'évictions qui, aux yeux des gouvernants, apparaissent comme une condition nécessaire à la requalification des centres urbains du pays en villes modernes, attractives et économiquement compétitives. Plus que partout ailleurs, des territoires stratégiques de Cotonou, la principale vitrine économique du pays, visés par d'ambitieux projets de rénovation urbaine, sont la cible de décisions d'évictions exécutées tambour battant et à grand renfort médiatique contre leurs occupants. Or, ces territoires qui sont aujourd'hui disputés entre la puissance publique et les gouvernés, constituent pour l'essentiel et parfois depuis de longue date, le cadre de vie de ressortissants des milieux populaires. Mais, alors qu'ils passent dans la doxa politique internationale pour des gens vulnérables, les gouvernants se montrent paradoxalement méprisants à leur égard en matière d'assistance à la réinstallation.

Le présent papier est une contribution aux réflexions sur la gouvernance et la « modernisation » des villes africaines. Comme tel, il se propose d'analyser, sur la base de matériaux empiriques recueillis à propos d'expériences ultérieures des victimes de la démolition récente d'un quartier côtier de Cotonou (Fiyégnon I), la façon dont les évictions inopinées dans les milieux populaires affectent les conditions d'existence des victimes, surtout en absence de tout programme d'accompagnement.

Mots-clés : Ville ; Eviction ; Conditions d'existence ; Milieux populaires ; Cotonou.