Contesting the anticipated infrastructural city: a grounded analysis of silk road urbanization in the multipurpose port terminal in Chancay, Peru
Author(s)
Apostolopoulou, Elia
Pizarro, Alejandra
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
A new private port and logistics complex is under construction in the city of Chancay, located north of Lima, Peru, as part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) promising to change life in the city while expanding a Sino-centric globalized economy and Peru’s reach within it. Through a series of interviews conducted between 2020 and 2022 and document analysis, we seek to offer a grounded theorization of how the BRI, as an exemplar of infrastructure-led urbanization, interweaves with broader sociospatial and socionatural transformations, affecting the present and future of the places where it materializes. By using the concept of the infrastructural city we show how the combination of port and logistics infrastructures with spatial interventions in periurban space is guiding contemporary urbanization, resulting in the formation of a new, amorphous city that has as its defining characteristic the domination of infrastructure over urban life, eradicating prior functions and marginalizing local grievances to facilitate the creation of a privatized enclave for international trade. Our analysis provides insights into the intricate and multifaceted geographies of emerging Chinese-sponsored infrastructural strategies, the hopes and struggles that contextually shape them, and the potentially distinctive and contested urban features of the anticipated infrastructural cities yet to come.
Date Issued
2025-01-01
Date Acceptance
2024-08-19
Citation
Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 2025, 115 (1), pp.223-241
ISSN
0004-5608
Publisher
Routledge
Start Page
223
End Page
241
Journal / Book Title
Annals of the Association of American Geographers
Volume
115
Issue
1
Copyright Statement
# 2024 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
Subjects
Belt and Road Initiative
environmental justice
Geography
infrastructural violence
infrastructure-led development
logistics
POLITICS
Social Sciences
VIOLENCE
Publication Status
Published
Date Publish Online
2024-10-23