Kean Fan Lim, Newcastle University

Infrastructure-led development has become a prominent World Bank planning prescription for city-regions. This presentation critically evaluates this prescription in Chongqing, a major metropolis in southwestern China. The launchpad of the transformative China-EU transcontinental railway project (中欧班列), Chongqing is a highly apposite site for evaluating both the logics and outcome of infrastructure-led development in/for city-regions. This seminar first explores the project’s historical origins by highlighting the causal roles of key actors. It then discusses the railway’s effects on developing industrial capacities based on a survey of 50 manufacturing firms. The seminar demonstrates how infrastructure-led development in Chongqing occurred organically into a cross-scalar process, which calls into question the universal applicability of the World Bank’s prescription. Findings also suggest, however, that enhanced infrastructural connectivity is necessary for the urbanization of capital in interior city-regions in China. The relevant policy question, then, is how to secure infrastructural investments that are suited to the contexts of these city-regions.