Urbanisation, Infrastructure and Inequality: Unraveling the contested geographies of neoliberal capitalism
The post-2008 era signalled the emergence of an infrastructure-led development paradigm worldwide. The need to extract new raw materials, minimize the distance between areas of resource extraction, production and consumption and access cheap and skilled labour and favourable regulatory environments, along with the availability of cheap capital and low interest rates by major economies, including the US and China, fuelled a global infrastructure rush (Tooze 2018). Hilyard and Sol (2017) characterise this period as the era of extreme infrastructure that is remaking places and socionatures to establish capital-friendly tradescapes and mega-corridors.
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During accumulation crises state-funded infrastructure projects are often initiated to revitalise economic growth by facilitating geographical restructuring and expansion confirming that capital’s life-process consists in its constant movement (Marx 1887). Urbanisation plays a central role in this process of reterritorialization and expansion that stems from its ability to absorb surplus capital (Christophers 2011; Harvey 2018; Lefebvre 1974; Smith 2008).
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These trends reshape and reconfigure urban geographies, recalibrate local economies and are implicated in the profound (re)making of places, socionatures and geographies of everyday lives in several cities across the Global South and North.
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Tracing the links between infrastructure-led development, urban transformation and inequality in China’s Belt and Road Initiative
In this project, I explored the links between infrastructure-led development, urban transformation and inequality in China’s Belt and Road Initiative. I theorised the BRI as an exemplar of infrastructure-led development that primarily acts as a spatial fix to the overaccumulation problems of Chinese capitalism while also benefiting corporate elites beyond China. By drawing on the experiences of three cities, namely London, Athens, and Colombo, where BRI-related projects are being currently materialised, I investigated the way the initiative transforms the geographies of everyday lives, remaking places, ecosystems and livelihoods. I concluded that the BRI is an emblematic manifestation of the emergence of a tight interrelationship between infrastructure-led development and authoritarian neoliberal urbanism that despite its variegated expressions across different contexts is deepening social, spatial and environmental inequality in several cities across the Global South and North.