Amid growing interest in China’s role in financing and building infrastructure in Africa, there is still little research on how Chinese-financed infrastructures are negotiated and realised at the city and metropolitan scale. We compare the Light Rail Transit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia with the expressway linking Kampala to Entebbe airport in Uganda, examining the processes of bargaining behind these transport infrastructures and their emergent effects on urban land use and city-dwellers’ mobility. We find that both projects were designed and implemented through opaque negotiations between African national elites and Chinese agencies, with little or no engagement from city authorities, leading to haphazard outcomes that are poorly integrated with broader planning. Yet we also suggest that despite being enabled and mediated by Chinese agencies, such projects do not embody a Chinese global vision. They instead reflect the entrepreneurial activities of Chinese contractors and the varying ways in which these connect with African national governments’ shifting priorities. Moreover, as they are subsumed into the urban context, these transposed infrastructures have been rapidly repurposed and their ‘Chineseness’ diluted, with one morphing into an infrastructure for the poor and the other into a site of private value extraction. We thus argue that, far from representing a domineering or neo-colonial influence, Chinese-financed infrastructures that land in institutionally complex African city-regions can be rapidly swallowed up into the political-economic landscape, producing contingent benefits and disbenefits that are far removed from the visions of any planners – Chinese or African, past or present.

The article explores the role of state‐owned enterprises (SOEs) in the globalisation of China's infrastructure capital. Examining how accumulation strategies of Chinese SOEs are driven by a complex set of political and economic, state and private, interests, it foregrounds the inherently hybrid nature of China's state capitalism. We use Kenya's Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) as a case study to analyse how state infrastructure capital traverses borders, and the specific ways that contradictions of accumulation in China are relocated through the improvised hybridity of SOEs. In Kenya, China Road and Bridge Corporation, the main SGR contractor, shifted and adapted its strategies as the pursuit of economic productivity gave way to political priorities in China, simultaneously responding to changing socio‐political circumstances in Kenya and across East Africa. Analysing these dynamics, we highlight the contingencies of, and limitations to, structural reorganisation of actually existing forms of state capitalism in China and beyond.

The relationship between industrialisation and urban development is subject to assumptions based on experiences in the global North, with little research on how it plays out in countries undergoing urbanisation and industrialisation today. In the context of recent excitement about China’s role in stimulating an ‘industrial revolution’ in Africa, we examine how Chinese zones in Ethiopia and Uganda are influencing the urban–industrial nexus. We argue that Chinese zones are key sites of urban–industrial encounter, but these dynamics are not primarily driven by the government officials that dominate the ‘policy mobilities’ literature, nor by the State-Owned Enterprises usually associated with Chinese activity overseas. Rather, they are emerging through the activities of inexperienced private Chinese actors who do not even operate in the worlds of urban policy. Faced with government histories and capacities that vastly differ from China’s, directly replicating the Chinese experience is virtually impossible; yet the tentative and improvisational relationships between Chinese firms, African government authorities and other local actors are gradually moulding new urbanisms into shape. The piecemeal bargaining and negotiation that unfolds through these relationships bridges some of the gaps between industrialisation and planning, but this cannot compensate for the governance of the urban–industrial nexus at higher scales.

No abstract