Paper short abstract:

Our paper investigates imaginaries that accompany investments in port infrastructures at the Gulf of Aden. We show how infrastructures insert themselves in urban lifeworlds and shape future trajectories by connecting an imagined past (present past) with an expected future (present future).

Paper long abstract:

Our paper investigates narratives and imaginaries that accompany international investments in port infrastructures along the African side of the Gulf of Aden. A broad range of international actors are currently developing infrastructures in the Horn of Africa, and especially ports are often identified as entry points for the new scramble for Africa. This ‘new scramble’, however, is but one imaginary in which contemporary infrastructure developments are embedded. Other narratives link infrastructures to capitalist visions of a socially detached and frictionless world of consumption. Our paper comparatively examines such narratives that accompany the modernization of three urban seaports: Djibouti (Djibouti), Berbera (Somaliland), and Bosaso (Puntland/Somalia). Analytically, we build on Koselleck’s (2004) theory of historical times and show how international and national actors and investors are engaged in future-building in the Horn of Africa as they are promoting spatial imaginaries, invigorating (shared) memories, and formulating new aspirations. These narratives are inserted into everyday realities where they are absorbed, contested, adapted, and aligned with new meaning. Infrastructures, in this way, evolve as a material and discursive connection between an imagined past (present past) and an expected future (present future), a connection that is continuously (and sometimes violently) rearticulated while it materializes in installations that are themselves shaping social trajectories and lifeworlds and, thereby, increasingly influences how the future unfolds.