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- Convenors:
-
Sebastian De Pretto
(University of Bern)
Samuel Grinsell (UCL (University College London))
Sheng Fei
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- Chair:
-
Odinn Melsted
(Maastricht University)
- Discussants:
-
Julia Tischler
(Basel University)
Daniel Rothenburg (University of Konstanz)
- Formats:
- Panel
- Streams:
- Envisaging A Global South
- Location:
- Room 11
- Sessions:
- Friday 23 August, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
How can viewing the history of infrastructure from the Global South change our thinking about the making of modern environments? This panel aims to bring together scholars to discuss the diverse histories of modern infrastructure in the Global South, from the plantation to the internet cable.
Long Abstract:
In the modern era, societies in the Global South have been transformed by infrastructural interventions often dictated by powerful countries in the Global North. Trade in spices, enslaved people, precious minerals and raw materials developed in concert with assemblages of extraction, storage and transportation. Canals, railways, mines, pipelines, docks, warehouses, shipping containers etc. have reshaped land, water and air. Environments such as rivers and forests have themselves been made into works of infrastructure, through damming and monocropping. Therefore any history of modern infrastructure must deal, in part, with the despoliation of the South by the North.
At the same time, innovations celebrated as achievements of the North often depended on the people and societies of the South. Empires were treated as vast laboratories by Northern scientists, who obscured the contributions of the colonised people they worked with (Tilley 2011); products such as shellac, silk and cochineal depended on indigenous knowledge of insect domestication (Mellilo 2014); and some of the grandest colonial infrastructure projects were more about wresting control away from colonised people than they were about increasing efficiency (Derr 2019). Thus, the Global South was not only a zone of extraction, but also a vital site in the production of modern infrastructure.
This panel is part of the work towards a proposed new handbook for the global history of modern infrastructure. The organisers invite contributions from scholars at all career stages working on any aspect of the history of infrastructure in the Global South from the 1700s to the present.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 23 August, 2024, -Sara Rocha Fritz (Federal University of Santa Catarina)
Paper short abstract:
An analysis of how the planning and implementation of the BR-101 highway intertwined with the transformations in the landscape of the Atlantic Forest in Brazil, during the 1950s and 1970s, since both runs along the Brazilian coastline from North to South.
Paper long abstract:
The Atlantic Rainforest runs along the Brazilian coast from North to South and it is historically the most impacted ecosystem by the processes of settlements , industrialization and urbanization in the country. One of the most important processes that was responsible for the alteration of the Atlantic Forest was the building of the railroads and highways. The aim of this presentation is to analyze the planning and the implementation processes of the highway BR-101 and how it intertwined with the transformations in the landscape of the Atlantic Rainforest. The BR-101 highway also currently runs along the Brazilian coastline from end to end, making the layout of this 4.650 km road overlaps with the forest. The Atlantic Forest was considered an obstacle in the construction of the highway and the road was integrated into the formation of a new landscape. As sources will be used: speeches of governors and presidents, periodicals and scripts. The BR-101 was built during the civil-military dictatorship (1964-1985). This moment was marked by predatory economic development plans, which placed the construction of large infrastructure works - such as highways - as a way of dominating nature, especially forests, through a discourse of territorial integration, articulation of economic poles and guarantee national economy and security.
Liora Bigon (Ariel University)
Paper short abstract:
With a focus on some of the large- and small-scale colonial railway projects in colonial West Africa as associated with peanut monocrop transportation – we will scrutinize the active role of these projects in the region's settlement planning and design intertwining primary visual evidence.
Paper long abstract:
The lecture will focus on some of the large-scale and small-scale colonial railway projects in French and British West Africa as associated with peanut monocrop production and transportation. Rather that embracing mainstream perspectives in the study of colonial railways – such as technical operative issues, economic history terrains of storage and seaport exportation, or North-South colonialist extraction and exploitation – the lecture will scrutinize the active role of this infrastructure in the region's settlement planning and design. Bringing into the fore the societal-cum-morphogenetic aspects of colonial town planning as directly related to these large- and small-scale railway projects in West Africa from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth, will enrich our understanding of the variety of trajectories of such infrastructure (whether planned or unexpected). The analysis will dwell on the ethno-cultural dimensions as were created and recreated by colonial segregationist urban-planning politics in association with railway layouts. Close attention with be assigned to indigenous, expatriate and repatriate populations and forms of habitation, and to variegated indigenous expressions with regard to these layouts. An emphasis will be put on the grandest projects of Dakar–Saint-Louis/Niger lines (1885/1924); Lagos– Ibadan/Kano lines (1901/1914); and the Lagos Steam Tramway (1902). Instrumental for the analysis are visual data collected from multilateral colonial archives in the UK, France, Senegal and Nigeria; and from the author's recent fieldwork in Senegal along the lines of this infrastructure and its offsprings.
Animesh Chatterjee (University of Stavanger)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the history of public electrical infrastructure in colonial Calcutta within multiple landscapes and environments - political, environmental, technological - and moves away from an image of a technological system shaped solely by governmental, economic and political factors.
Paper long abstract:
Histories of electricity in the context of colonial India tend to tell us one-sided stories of “development” and “growth” of electrical systems, and they usually analyse human activities and politics in these processes. By shifting the focus to the tangled ways in which the technical realities of electric supply was tied not just to the governance and socio-spatial restructuring of the city, but also the complexities that factors like the weather, climate, seasons and nonhuman animals introduced into electrical technologies and infrastructure, this paper tells a different story. Building on scholarship that has increasingly approached the natural world as both an active force in history and an object of sustained human concern, this paper shows how implementations of varied ideas of an “Electrical Calcutta” was a process involving financial and political negotiations that were majorly influenced by human-environment interactions. While the colonial government sought to use electric supply, lighting and trams to create an optical imagery that articulated and materialised colonial authority, public, urban and domestic spaces needed to redefined in order to accommodate for the affects of heat, humidity and termites on physical and electrical infrastructure, thereby disrupting the colonial government’s idea of a sanitised urban centre. Overall, this paper lies at the intersection of environmental history (weather, climate and nonhumans), urban and infrastructural mapping (soil conditions, urban planning, and stacked infrastructure), and history of technology (electric and gas supply), seeking out the relations between the technological, financial, urban, spatial and environmental landscapes of colonial Calcutta.
Owain Lawson (Cardiff University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores a French-Lebanese competition over the Litani River between 1919–46 to argue that infrastructure and natural resource exploitation were pivotal means of asserting territorial sovereignty in the twentieth century.
Paper long abstract:
This paper historicizes infrastructural and natural resource development as pivotal practices of asserting sovereignty in the twentieth century. It argues that a shared commitment to efficient resource exploitation underwrote competitions among imperial and anti-imperial engineers over the right to assert sovereignty over landscapes in the interwar period. It focuses on the French-Lebanese competition to build hydroelectric infrastructure on Lebanon’s largest river, the Litani, a contested borderland. From the 1919 Paris Peace Conference through to Lebanese independence in 1943, French imperialists, Zionist developers, and Lebanese engineers sought to claim sovereignty over the Litani River basin by arguing that the river was flowing “wasted into the sea.” The League of Nations Mandate framework claimed that European imperial rule was a vehicle for technological modernization, epitomized by efficient resource management. But in practice, rather than pursuing efficient use, the French Mandate state in Lebanon distributed private monopolies over water resources, which prioritized profitability. Lebanese engineers pointed to the Mandate’s waste of the Litani as evidence that the Lebanese nation must rightfully claim it. Developing the river would simultaneously telegraph Lebanon’s sovereignty in international legal fora, build sovereignty as a fact on the ground, and secure that sovereignty by supporting economic self-determination. However, tensions over the nature of the national “self” defined such claims of self-determination. Most communities in the Litani Basin rejected both France and the Lebanese nation, including by means of armed insurgency. These contestations reveal how the built environment can establish uneven and disjointed patterns of imbricated state and popular sovereignty.
Galia Limor-Sagiv (SCE - Shamoon college of engineering)
Paper short abstract:
Hiriya, Israel’s largest landfill, built on the ruins of an Arab village, is a symbol of neglect and environmental hazard. The waste infrastructure served as a political tool to loot natural assets and erase the heritage of weak habitants. It outlined the borderline between centre and periphery.
Paper long abstract:
Hiriya is Israel’s largest landfill. Located in the heart of the country, it became a symbol of stench, ugliness, and of Israel's environmental approach. The landfill started to function after the 1948 war near the destroyed Palestinian village of Al-Khairiya, whose residents were expelled, thus dramatically altering the landscape. Shortly before the establishment of the landfill, new Jewish immigrants, mostly from Islamic countries, settled in the area. The new landfill, theoretically modern and efficient, only led to neglect, distressing the lives of its neighbors and harming the surrounding nature. While the inhabitants next to the landfill had no choice but to leave, the greater area around continued to suffer for decades, becoming the metropolis’ backyard.
Hiriya joins global phenomena of settler-colonialism, in which infrastructure methods serve as political tools to loot the land and its assets. Emptied territories became the first world’s backyards while erasing the heritage of former inhabitants. Tel Aviv, the modern-cosmopolitan city, built urban infrastructures which oppressed and displaced weak communities, thus outlying the borderline between centre and periphery. The story however has a positive turn: after fifty years the landfill ceased operation, and a large park is under construction on its grounds. This process initiated the recovery of a damaged area, and led to social, environmental, and infrastructural recovery.
The research makes use of hitherto unexplored written and visual archival documents, and conducted within a broad theoretical framework of landscape research that draws on various complementary fields of knowledge such as history, cultural studies, and infrastructure.
Uma Dey Sarkar (Jawaharlal Nehru University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper investigates tubewells as urban water infrastructure at the junction of two concerns: access to safe water and public health concerns which centred groundwater as an ideal ‘contamination-free’ water source, and cheap dissemination of pumping technology through state interventions.
Paper long abstract:
Groundwater, as a sustained source of water for daily uses in urban areas, has received scant attention. As has been established by a rich body of scholarship, piped networks have fallen short of the ‘modern infrastructural ideal’ in the global South and the uncertainty associated with piped water is mitigated by unacknowledged dependence on groundwater (Birkinshaw, 2022; Dey Sarkar and Choudhary, 2020; Truelove, 2019). However, comprehensive analysis of the emergence and consolidation of tubewells as urban infrastructure has been missing. This paper aims to write a brief history of the emergence of tubewells as urban infrastructure at the intersection of critical urban studies and STS (transition studies).
This paper intends to investigate the emergence of tubewells as urban water infrastructure as a moment created at the junction of two concerns: access to safe water and public health concerns which centred groundwater as an ideal ‘contamination-free’ water source, and wide dissemination of pumping technology which rapidly diffused throughout landscapes. While concerns about ‘the bacteriological city’ can be traced to colonial State’s obsession with public health, modern infrastructural ideals, and ordering of spaces and bodies of ‘contaminated’ natives, these concerns figured prominently in the discourses of post-colonial states and transnational developmental institutions. Furthermore, this paper would like to investigate the assemblages in which urban tubewells are entangled (storage containers, water-level devices, water filtering devices) and the relationships which are nurtured by tubewells as urban infrastructure.
Nathalia Capellini (University of Geneva)
Paper short abstract:
This presentation deals with the infrastructures implemented during of the Amazonian Oriente's oil boom (1960s-1980s). From the specifies of the local environment to global dynamics, it analyzes the conditions that were needed for their installation and how they unsettled the rainforest.
Paper long abstract:
Today the production of energy in the Amazon region is a high stakes endeavor. The implementation of those multi-billion dollars oil extraction or hydroelectricity production infrastructures are condemned by local and international actors, because of their large impacts to the environment and communities. These large-scale infrastructures start to be built in the Amazon in the 1960s with the beginning of commercial oil extraction in its Oriente (Ecuador, Colombia and Peru), followed by hydroelectric dams in the Brazilian Amazon. From almost no activity in this domain, in a few decades energy became a highly productive sector and that has spread over the region.
This presentation will analyze the infrastructures for petroleum extraction and transportation implemented during what has been called the Amazonian oil boom, notably in Ecuador and Peru. It will develop on the conditions that were needed for their installation and how they unsettled the rainforest, sometimes in unexpected ways. From changes in the landscape and ecosystem, to the emergence of new building techniques but also environmental legislations, I will argue that thinking about energy infrastructure implementation in the Amazon offers important insights for the study of infrastructures. Linking state projects with capitalist dynamics, environmental destruction to social organization, this presentation will dwell on the ties of global processes, but also the specificity of local contexts.
Atefeh Safarabadi Farahani (University of Jyväskylä) Shubha Srishti (Tata Institute of Social Science India)
Paper short abstract:
The water issue is closely linked to the social justice issue. water insecurity can excessively disadvantage, poor and vulnerable groups. In this panel, we are discussing two different thesis projects progressing in different settings (arid areas and flood-prone areas) with an ecosocial approach.
Paper long abstract:
The article "Ecosocial Work in the Context of Traditional Water Management" delves into the transformative changes occurring in sustainable water management, with a keen focus on belief systems, human attitudes, and collective behaviors. This shift is particularly pertinent in arid regions grappling with water scarcity. A prime example of sustainable water management comes from ancient Iranian plateau dwellers over 3000 years ago, who engineered the remarkable Qanat system. This underground water distribution method, originating in the mountains and channeling water to farms, gardens, and towns, has transcended time and geography, benefiting countless communities. The research's central aim is to examine this system through an ecosocial framework to unravel its potential for fostering social sustainability.
Meanwhile, the project "From ‘Living with Flood’ to ‘Living with Disaster’" in the Kosi River Basin adopts an Ecosocial Work Perspective to explore shifting discourse on floods and flood-water management. Historically, flood management was community-centric, but it has evolved to prioritize irrigation, flood control embankments, and hydroelectric development, often at the expense of ecosystems, water resources, and social equity. The paper scrutinizes this transformation in flood management discourse and its implications for the daily lives of people in the region from an ecosocial work standpoint. It underscores the need to move beyond viewing floods as isolated incidents and recognizes their pervasive presence in the context of flood-prone regions. This comprehensive perspective seeks to facilitate more holistic, sustainable, and equitable approaches to water management and disaster resilience.
Emily Story (Salisbury University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the political ecology of infrastructure expansion, especially highways, in twentieth-century Brazil. Current environmental degradation and conflict are a direct result of the road building project that originated in the middle of the century.
Paper long abstract:
Brazil’s population and economic centers have historically been concentrated near the coast. In the twentieth century, efforts to exploit the economic potential of the vast interior lands increased. Road building was central to that project. During the Great Acceleration, a developmentalist perspective took hold in global south, including Brazil. From that viewpoint, natural spaces held the key to economic and sociopolitical advancement. Eschewing the colonial logic that cast the people of the so-called “third world” as inferior, developmentalists understood underdevelopment as a practical problem that could be solved if approached systematically.
In Brazil, attention turned increasingly toward the economic potential of the sparsely populated and underdeveloped north and west of the country—which included, but was not limited to, Amazonia. For politicians of various stripes, developing nature held the key to national progress. Building a new national capital in the interior provided an impetus to that effort, as it provided a destination for a new network of highways. Brasília epitomized the automotive age. Motor vehicles were foundational to the urban plan and the relationship between the city and the rest of the country. It required and therefore spurred a dramatic expansion of highways throughout the nation, improving connections between existing population centers, and extending roads into previously isolated spaces. New roads made subsequent settlement and economic activity, both authorized and illegal, possible.