Seminar: "China's BRI. Infrastructure-led development, urban transformation and inequality"

Program

Abstract

In this talk, I explore the links between infrastructure-led development, urban transformation and inequality in China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). I theorise the BRI as a spatial fix to the overaccumulation problems of Chinese capitalism and I pay particular attention to the role of urbanization. By drawing on postcolonial geographies, my goal is to offer a relational analysis of divergent trajectories of socio-spatial urban change driven by BRI projects in Europe and Asia. My key argument is that urban transformation driven by the BRI signals the emergence of a new form of infrastructure-led, authoritarian neoliberal urbanism. This engenders both new urban formations and new urban politics that, despite variegated expressions across different contexts, are reconfiguring urban space and are transforming the social geography of each city by creating, facilitating or exacerbating spatial fragmentation and social segregation.

Elia Apostolopoulou

Human geographer and a political ecologist. She is a senior research fellow in the University of Cambridge and an editor in Dialogues in Human Geography. Her work focuses on various aspects related to the uneven production of nature and space within and beyond cities. It is guided by radical research on human and social geography, political economy and political ecology on the neoliberalisation of nature and space, uneven geographical development, neoliberal natures, social movements and the spatialities of resistance, green and ungreen grabbing, austerity politics, infrastructure, housing and communities, planetary urbanisation, social, spatial and environmental inequality and justice, and grassroots activism. More recently, a major part of her research also focuses on the way China's Belt and Road Initiative is changing cities across the Global South and North.

To participate in this seminar, please contact larguellesr@uoc.edu.