Reimagining the promise of infrastructure from below: A proposed research agenda

Abstract

We offer a framework for a research agenda that takes a closer and comparative look at three inter-related sectors in which transformative dynamics lead to settlement transition: namely, the politics of planning, land use transformations, and evolving governance systems at the local scales. We also argue that research on mega-projects and infrastructural investments needs to go beyond assessments on success/failure of completion and economic/financial metrics alone and begin to unpack how large economic and infrastructural investments such as these mega-projects are substantially triggering large-scale processes of social, economic, environmental and spatial change at local and regional scales.

Taking a step aside from the mega projects themselves, our research agenda conceives agency on settlement transition cum urbanisation as distributed across various ranges of actors, including institutions, communities, as well as entrepreneurs and large corporates. It questions whether the performativity of megaprojects in Asia is more to be found in the collective and plural drive towards urban transition triggered by large-scale developments, than in the actual concretization of their initial programmatic contents.