Inhabiting urban corridors

AbdouMaliq Simone

- completed -

Urbanization is no longer embodied by the city, but takes a multiplicity of spatial, physical and social forms. Much work has been done on the infrastructure, production networks and commodity circuits at work in the articulation of existent urban regions in the formation of corridors. This project undertakes a more socio-cultural exploration of the complexion of mobilities, labour, and social interchange at work in these corridors, using them as a site to understand the composition of new heterogeneities from materiality, everyday life and built environments. A workshop of twenty-eight social scientists working on the relationships between culture, urbanization and infrastructure along the East African Indian Ocean coast was conducted in October 2016 to explore key theoretical and methodological issues that will be further investigated, both in this region and in the emerging Kolkata-Kunming corridor (an element of the One Belt/One Road) in Bangladesh, China, India, Myanmar (BCIM corridor projects).