How urban Africa challenges the coloniality of infrastructure

Abstract

Recent scholarship has foregrounded the role of global infrastructure in the endurance and reproduction of colonial relations of power at the heart of capitalism. This issue advances this perspective by interrogating how urban Africa challenges the coloniality of infrastructure. It argues against the deductive tendency of coloniality as a global framework. In doing so, it articulates three standpoints. First, that grounding analyses of infrastructure and race in specific historical geographies and relational racial formations contributes to a more critical global urban studies. Second, that attending to the spatial and ideological legacies of anti-colonial struggles, postcolonial state-building, and authoritarian governance reveals how infrastructure projects can reconfigure inherited power relations beyond linear narratives of colonial continuity or endurance. Third, that foregrounding the political, symbolic, and economic lives of infrastructure—as sites of imagination and valuation—complicates accounts of deployment, resistance, and refusal in urban and infrastructure studies.