Infrastructural (im)mobility: Urban maritime development in the Suez Canal Zone and Marseille

Abstract

This article explores the entwined politics of infrastructure and (im)mobility through a relational comparison of the Suez Canal Area Development Project (SCADP) in the Suez Canal Zone, Egypt and the Euroméditerranée Urban Renewal Project (EuroMed) in Marseille, France. Two of the largest urban maritime development projects in North Africa and the ‘Euro-Mediterranean’, SCADP and EuroMed were planned and constructed amidst an overlapping surge in global infrastructure construction and a racialized refugee reception crisis. Through a situated analysis of the everyday urban lives of SCADP and EuroMed, the article analyzes how these large-scale infrastructures rely on and reproduce historical and place-specific geographies of uneven and racialized mobility. These include migrant containment regimes and urban displacement. Building on this analysis, the article proposes the concept of infrastructural (im)mobility, which argues that coerced mobility is a pervasive and underlying force driving global capitalist urbanization and infrastructure construction today. Through a multi-scalar analysis of SCADP and EuroMed, it shows how the concept elucidates a global political geography increasingly defined by the intersecting patterns, economies, and crises of infrastructure and (im)mobility. The article accordingly contributes to critical debates on the coloniality of infrastructure in and beyond the urban ports of the Mediterranean Sea.