Infrastructures for Global Production in Ethiopia and Argentina

Abstract

The establishment of industry and logistics for global commodity production is reconfiguring urban spatial and economic structures while giving rise to novel transnational actor constellations. This chapter focuses on two current cases of infrastructure provisioning in Ethiopia and Argentina, involving international partners, predominantly companies and financial institutions from the PR China. In Mekelle, Ethiopia, a large export processing zone has been built, with road and rail connections to international sea ports, as an aspiring hub of global garment production. Rosario metropolitan area hosts Argentina’s most important ports for soy export and is receiving vast investments in cargo rail and port facilities. We discuss the physical architectures and urban context of the infrastructure complexes, as well as the (trans-)local actor constellations involved in their design and implementation, situating them within different spatial and temporal layers of infrastructure and industry development. In order to grasp the relational, transnational character of the spatial reconfigurations under study, we propose to link commodity chain approaches with geographical thinking on uneven spatial development. Building on these approaches, we examine relationships between the built environment and global production relations in order to contextualize the material infrastructures of globalized production within the larger political economy of uneven spatial development.