Extreme Infrastructure
Infrastructure Corridors in Context

Infrastructure corridors – not just roads and railways but also energy and water corridors – are being planned around the world on an almost unimaginable scale. No (inhabited) continent is excluded from the vision. Hundreds of millions of people will be affected. Some of the plans are national in scale, others regional and still others continent-wide or near-global.

This presentation at the 2017 conference of Eurodad explores the drivers of this “extreme infrastructure” and their consequences. Such drivers include capital's need:

• for bigger and faster forms of transport to carry out “extreme production” and “extreme extraction”;
• to shrink the time and distance between consumers and the areas where resources are extracted and processed.

“Extreme infrastructure”, the presentation concludes, is reinforcing the divide between those who benefit from extreme extraction, extreme production and extreme finance and those whose class interests are opposed to “just-in-time” delivery, agglomerating pools of cheap labour and the ravaging of the earth in pursuit of profit – and it is this divide that needs to be explored, explained and mobilised around.

Eurodad is a European Network on Debt and Development of 46 civil society organisations from 19 European countries, works for specific transformative changes to global and European policies, institutions, rules and structures to ensure a democratically controlled, environmentally sustainable financial and economic system that works to eradicate poverty and ensure human rights for all.

See also How Infrastructure is Shaping the World.