Nairobi Workshop GlobalCORRIDOR Urbanization, everyday life + techno-social differentiation Case Study: East Africa

The 21st century has witnessed an intensifying investment into the infrastructures required for New Transnational Trade Routes (NTTR) through which these corridor projects cut across cities, countries and regions as they seek to materially integrate into specific accumulation regimes, historical conditions and geographical contexts. Corridors, therefore, move people, goods and information and include trade, transportation and logistics corridors in addition to buried telecommunications networks, energy pipelines and urban enclaves as the spaces where these networks come together and concentrate. Corridors such as LAPSETT or the Central Corridor in East Africa aim to organise economic and social life around particular logics and plans. And these investments are shaping a new global, urban geography as they demarcate futures incorporating hundreds of millions of urban dwellers. They therefore are critical sites that offer the potential to support economic development in urban regions through new relations and connections, for instance between East African cities and the Chinese or South Asian economies. But the deployment of global corridors from port expansions to new train lines or luxury skyscraper enclaves can also harm communities: displacement and violence, unequal access to technologies, and a shift from public to private governance of spaces. This research proposes a focus on the large-scale infrastructure projects known as corridors worth tens of billions of Euros of investment and that cut across cities and regions as the world economy is being restructured.

Speakers

Prof. Jonathan Silver
GlobalCorridor Project Lead

Dr. Kennedy Gitu
Country Director - British Institute in Eastern Africa

Joel Ongwech
Kampala GlobalCorridor Project

Dr. Bernard Musembi
BIEA Research Fellow, Accountable Adaptation Project

Dr. Tom Gillespie
Senior Lecturer in Global Urban Development, Global Development Institute, University of Manchester

Dr. Pamela Ochungo
BIEA Research Fellow, MAESAM Project

Dr. Catherine Gateri
BIEA Research Fellow, Global Corridor Project