“Silk Road here we come”: Infrastructural myths, post-disaster politics, and the shifting urban geographies of Nepal

Abstract

In this paper, we explain how China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) drives urban transformation in Nepal reconfiguring geopolitical and geoeconomic relations and remaking the sociopolitical, cultural and material fabric of hitherto peripheral spaces. Given that BRI infrastructures materialize in parallel with Chinese-funded reconstruction projects, we pay attention to the role of post-disaster politics to unravel how ongoing urban transformation does not only affect the present and the future but also people's histories and post-disaster memories by treating places of (re)building as empty of previous life and history. By drawing on 16 months of fieldwork, we show that despite the evident role of the BRI as an agent of urban transformation, the materialization of most BRI projects depends on geopolitical rivalries, negotiations, unstable local coalitions and escalating social contestation. We conclude that in the post-disaster era, BRI projects have become new vehicles towards Naya [new] Nepal, along with many other infrastructural myths that preceded the country's modern history. Nonetheless, the Naya urban Nepal that is emerging from the ruins of the past is contested and uncertain, a far cry from the days of the Panchayat regime and the civil war, when such gargantuan projects were rarely challenged by Nepali people. This is the unique trajectory of Silk Road urbanization in Nepal: an ultimate path to reach a long due rural-to-urban transition that is inextricably linked with decades of infrastructural violence and precarity and strongly shaped by people's struggles against the unequal geographies of BRI-driven urban transformation.