Paper short abstract:

The paper explores parallels between infrastructure futures of unfinished "ghost projects" and the horror genre, focussing on uncertainty and (in-)visibility as common characteristics.

Paper long abstract:

How are promised but unfinished infrastructure projects encountered by those people whose future is entangled with them? In this presentation I make the case for understanding these ‘ghost projects’ as horror stories, focussing on two characteristics of the horror genre that can help highlight socially differentiated effects of unfinished infrastructure projects. First, Alfred Hitchcock famously observed that the anticipation of something horrific is what truly scares the audience. I argue that these anticipations are contingent on past experience of violence, or ‘memories of the future’: people anticipate being harmed by unfinished infrastructure projects if they or their people have previous been harmed by similar interventions in the past. Second, a core aspect of horror is the instable process of revelation, as opposed to either complete invisibility or visibility as consistent states. Ghost projects understood as works-in-progress are inherently revelatory in this sense, introducing a visual dimension to the study of ‘ghost projects’. The presented article is based on empirical material collected during fieldwork in East Africa since 2018, and includes studies from different large scale infrastructure projects including hydropower projects and development corridors in Tanzania and Kenya. It concludes with some general thoughts on the relation between uncertain futures and visual aspects of infrastructure, as well as critical reflections on the usefulness of literature studies for critical infrastructure studies.