56. Overwhelmed infrastructures. Comparative perspectives on mobilities and urban displacement in Africa

Cities all over the world have developed, in the last decades, new mobility, transport and infrastructure plans (Beck, K.; Klaeger, G. and Stasik, M. 2017, Dalakoglou 2017, Dalakoglou & Harvey, 2012; Harvey & Knox, 2015, Horta & Malet 2014, Melnik 2018). These are technopolitical devices that bet not only on models of displacement, but also new uses and new ways of moving. In this dynamic, the countries and cities of the Global South register attempts to “modernize” mobility systems and models. These go beyond the renewal of the logistics systems and the vehicle fleet, and often consist of the resumption of the direct presence of the State in the governance of urban and interurban mobility. To all this, we must add the arrival of platforms – such as Uber or Bolt – to which are added others developed locally. Promises to improve mobility are presented, either by those who implement them or by international institutions and agendas, as a path to environmental sustainability and economic development, often understood the latter only through the prism of neoliberalism. However, these new models of mobility, as well as the means of transport and the infrastructures that deploy them, are quickly overwhelmed by unexpected uses, new technologies, new vehicles and means of mobility, which can contradict these plans. We also find, at a global level, the emergence of new means of transporting people and goods that use new technologies, business models (such as platform economies, Kenney and Zysman 2016, Rogers 2016) and infrastructures – newly built or already present—in ways that the urban planners had not planned, often at the limit of legality and traffic rules, and sometimes causing the collapse of the infrastructure they use. At the same time, these supposedly new forms of mobility are intertwined and combined with already established ones, as well as with forms of governance and work organization that shape them uniquely in each context. In this panel we propose to discuss how these overflow processes are comparable and resonate with each other, and that a comparison between the dynamics identified in various African cities can help to develop a general framework for contemporary mobilities. We want to do this by contrasting these processes of implementation of new urban mobilities and forms of transport in various African cities, but understanding that the cases taken from cities in the global South can provide clues to understand dynamics that, although presented differently, they also take place in the Global North. Our comparison, on the contrary, suggests analyzing these cities as radically contemporary. Although the mobility models, the technologies and the infrastructures implemented seem very different, the problems they generate are nevertheless similar: they generate means of transport that use new technologies, often at the limit of legality and traffic rules, and overflow the infrastructure they use. The starting point will be, in any case, everyday mobilities and the way in which the series of processes mentioned in the preceding lines materialize and take shape while conditioning access and exclusion to services and opportunities by different groups · groups In this way, beyond attending to the economic, political and logistical dimensions of the various mobility systems that are compared, the panel aims to analyze and discuss urban mobility as a whole in different cities and the way in which various groups join it and thus see certain rights guaranteed or denied. This symposium is oriented as a contribution to an anthropology of infrastructures and mobility models (Sheller & Urry, 2006; Urry, 2006; Grieco & Urry, 2011; Salazar & Jayaram, 2016), within the framework of which has highlighted how urban displacement systems articulate narratives about globalization and promises of the future and connectivity, but also specific and tangible materialities in particular times and spaces. All within the framework of what is recognized as the (new) mobility paradigm (Urry, 2006; Sheller and Urry, 2006; Grieco and Urry, 2011; Salazar, N. and Jayaram, K. 2016), which allows us to place specific infrastructures, institutions and planning, and the material and social relations they imply, connecting them with different areas and scales – materiality and subjectivities; State and society; global capitalism and local contexts; actions in infrastructural matters and everyday conditions of existence – without leaving aside the way in which the plans and projects for organizing urban displacements are often overwhelmed by unanticipated uses, needs, appropriations and alternatives.