Project description
A closer look at life in the city
More people now live in urban than in rural areas. Over the next three decades, the UN reports that global population growth will likely take place almost exclusively in the cities. If properly managed, urbanisation can be a positive force for the reduction of poverty. This is particularly crucial today when new geographies are being produced with uncertain impacts on urban inequality. In this context, the EU-funded GlobalCORRIDOR project will shed light on how investments worth billions of euros into corridors can be used to transform the urbanisation process. It will also investigate how these processes might reinforce or address urban inequality. The findings will result in a new understanding of urbanisation, infrastructure and inequality.
Objective
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
Fields of science
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Funding Scheme
ERC-STG - Starting GrantHost institution
S10 2TN Sheffield
United Kingdom