Licensed larceny by Nicholas Hildyard

Author:Nicholas Hildyard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Manchester University Press

5.2 Corridors, hubs and cities: a whistle-stop tour

The combined pressures of economies of scale, the off-shoring of manufacturing, the growth of a ‘global consuming class’ and just-in-time delivery systems are now playing out in ‘a surge of infrastructural investments, enclosures and large-scale territorial planning strategies’ (Brenner 2014) aimed at better integrating production, distribution and consumption on a global scale. No (inhabited) continent is excluded: infrastructure masterplans have been drawn up (with little or no public consultation) for North, South and Central America, Africa, Asia, Europe, Australasia and the Arctic. The result is a potential (or actual) churning of geographies as efforts are made to restructure whole regions into ‘hubs’, ‘transit zones’, ‘development corridors’, ‘export zones’, ‘spatial development initiatives’, ‘interconnectors’ and ‘intermodal logistics terminals’, profoundly affecting the class focus of investment patterns.

For all the talk of providing poorer people with access to clean water or electricity, the planned (or already initiated) programmes are primarily directed at reducing ‘economic distance’, thereby unlocking remote mineral deposits and expanding the export of cheap agricultural produce; better harnessing landlocked countries to the global economy; expanding inland free trade zones and low wage production centres that have to date been largely restricted to coastal areas; speeding supply chain connections; and improving linkages between the 44 cities where the bulk of the ‘global consuming class’ are predicted to be living by 2025 (consultants McKinsey even chide investors that notions of ‘emerging markets’ are no longer ‘helpful’; instead, business should think in terms of cities and the linkages between them (Dobbs et al. 2015)). Some of the plans are national in scale, others regional and still others continent-wide or (as in China’s One Belt, One Road programme) near-global. But all have the goal of harnessing nature and the poor to the expansion of those forms of capital that profit from servicing, directly or indirectly, the one billion people whose incomes are high enough to make them significant consumers. And all would rely to a large extent for their finance on expanding the rents made available through Public–Private Partnerships.

Space does not allow a leisurely Grand Tour of the planned projects, but a flying visit is possible. The proposals that have been drawn up for the cheap labour- and resource-rich continents of Africa, South America and Asia give an idea of the gargantuan scale of the planners’ intentions. But before strapping in and buckling up, a quick word from the flight attendant: much as the planners might like to assume that it is their actions and intentions that will primarily determine the future of infrastructure, they are not the only characters who will write the story. Rocks, rivers, mountains, forests, machines, climate, weather, bacteria, furry and not-so-furry animals, legal texts, workers, peasants, indigenous peoples, slum dwellers, fishers, individual entrepreneurs, national parliaments and a myriad other human and non-human actors will also have a role: and it is the interplay among them that will ultimately determine whether or not the lines and blobs on the planners’ map materialise or disappear, get moved, ignored or erased or are used for purposes that the planners never intended (Mitchell 2002).

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