Urbanization, everyday life and techno-social differentiation

The pattern of contemporary, global urbanization is shifting. New geographies are being produced, with uncertain consequences for urban inequality. Vital here is surging investments into New Transnational Trade Routes through planning/operation of infrastructural corridors that cut across cities and regions, demarcating the futures of hundreds of millions of urban dwellers. Through deployment of advanced technologies, premium networks and high-tech enclaves’ corridors are transforming everyday urban life. However, there is little research interrogating the ways billions of Euros of investment into corridors transform the urbanization process nor how such processes might reinforce or address existing, or shape new trajectories of urban inequality, understood as techno-social differentiation. GlobalCORRIDOR will address these critical gaps by focusing on the everyday ways in which infrastructural life is now being produced, operated, experienced and navigated across corridors. This is advanced firstly, by assessing the global, urban geography/selected history of corridors (Objective 1). Second it explores the everyday assembling of Corridor Urbanization across three case study corridors (spanning the Mediterranean, North/East Africa, South Asia) (Objective 2). Third, it investigates everyday experiences of Corridor Urbanization within/outside selected enclaved spaces in order to understand the unequal ways in which infrastructure is experienced through access/costs/reliability/technology type (Objective 3). Fourth, it explains the global futures of corridors in reshaping the urbanization process in order to set a new agenda for research (Objective 4). Through generating an interdisciplinary, international programme of comparative research and the first comprehensive study of the corridor phenomena GlobalCORRIDOR will contribute to urban, geographical and technological studies, opening new ideas how we understand urbanization, infrastructure and inequality