Disjunct realities: understanding planning and governance through imaginaries of mega-infrastructure projects

Abstract

Infrastructure networks are emerging as critical technological and physical assets of modern urban regions. These networks are complex, multi-layered, and have power and politics embedded within them, with impact being felt across different scales. Building on the idea that planning offers different visions, fantasies or imaginations of the future, I look specifically for agency and where it lies in the context of large infrastructure projects. Whose visions, imaginations and fantasies do these mega-projects represent? Drawing on work done on industrial infrastructure programmes in the Indian context, this commentary focuses specifically on locating agency within this process of building infrastructure and draws on a series of cases of infrastructure development in the Indian context through which intra-scalar governance processes can begin to be analysed and understood.