ABSTRACT
Since the 19th century infrastructures have been associated with modernization and progress. While hard to define, infrastructure enables the circulation of goods, people, and ideas, and provides structure but also has agency. Infrastructures have long been tied to the promise of development, but also exploitation within imperial settings. These promises included market integration, economic growth potential, and social and sanitary improvements. Yet infrastructure has enhanced state power while industrialization brought uneven socio-economic consequences. The decades following 1945 saw great optimism with regard to using large-scale technological projects to uplift the Global South. Leaders of newly independent countries aligned with international organizations to engage in massive dam, road, and rail projects, within a Cold War-ridden world. In the 1960s, new ideas on smaller-scale infrastructures, including poverty reduction, health, and education, became more prominent. Added to this, more critical takes on infrastructure’s adverse effects on human rights and the environment became more vocal from the 1970s. While this put pressure on large-scale infrastructural development thinking, their alleged promises still persist today.
