Short Abstract

This panel explores mega-developments as “prismatic sites” of African urbanity and infrastructural experimentation. Rather than as manifestations of neoliberal urbanisation or speculation, it examines their diverse forms and socioeconomic and environmental dimensions in and across African cities.

Long Abstract

Despite their growing prominence, mega-developments have received comparatively limited attention in African urbanist and anthropological scholarship (De Boeck 2011, Gastrow 2015, Ullberg et al. 2025). Scholarship on African urbanity often remains largely dominated by discussions on informal and subaltern urbanism (Simone 2004, Pieterse 2008, Roy 2011, Silver 2014, Simone and Pieterse 2017). While African cities are urbanising at a most rapid rate, African governments increasingly embrace mega-developments as instruments of socio-economic restructuring, global connectivity and state legitimacy, thereby making infrastructure a key currency of political investment and socio-economic growth.

By proposing to more closely investigate mega-development’s socio-economic and environmental dimensions, this panel invites diverse contributions that draw on ethnographic, geographic, urban and historical research and convey a concrete sense of lived or speculative infrastructural experimentation and mega-development productions. The panel seeks to examine the political, social and environmental dimensions of mega-developments across African cities from above and below.

We specifically invite papers that upend categories of state-led, private-led, and mixed-use developments. Rather than treating these mega-projects simply as manifestations of neoliberal urbanisation, capitalist speculation, or as failures to deliver promised transformation, we approach them as “prismatic sites” of infrastructural experimentation through which multiple and often contested forms of urban life become visible. We are interested in the diverse forms that mega-developments take, including, but not limited to, large-scale housing, extractive, transport, water, digital, and agricultural infrastructures, data centers and industrial and special economic zones, smart and satellite cities, and large-scale renewable energy projects.

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