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Upgrading the Lobito Development Corridor: Speculative Infrastructures and Authoritarian Planning

The Everything Everywhere All at Once Project led by the Department of Political Studies is excited to present our Semester 2 events series.

Upgrading the Lobito Development Corridor: Speculative Infrastructures and Authoritarian

Planning

Jon Schubert, University of Basel

When global oil prices dropped in late 2014, Angola, Africa’s second-largest oil producer was plunged into a deep economic crisis from which it has yet to recover. The crisis prompted a handover of power in the ruling MPLA party and the adoption of a number of macroeconomic reforms. None of these measures, including securing additional support for a recently privatised Lobito Development Corridor (LDC), however, succeeded in mitigating the crisis or curbing the country’s deep dependency on oil revenues. Looked at from the perspective of Angola’s second port town, Lobito, this crisis is not a new or unexpected phenomenon, but rather a consequence of a long colonial and postcolonial history of extractivism, and of ‘fuzzy authoritarianism’, a sort of extractive, haphazard state developmentalism, deployed via the means of big infrastructure. This paper looks at the promises of the LDC upgrade and the way it is inserted into a broader economy of speculation that characterises contemporary Angola. This logic of speculation is replicated across scales, conditioning urban development and the possibilities of economic diversification in Angola. To demonstrate this, I examine processes of urban planning and the question of administrative autonomy in a system that is so heavily centralised as Angola. Rather than being only a question of lacking capacities or planning failure, this chapter shows how oil-dependency and infrastructural speculation are a fundamental and deliberate instrument of regime maintenance, that produces its own logics and urban aesthetics.

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