Time,temporality,and the dialectic of infrastructure-led urbanization–urbanism

Following the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, a broad political consensus has emerged around the mobilization of large-scale infrastructural imaginaries and initiatives to promote economic growth, foster territorial development, and advance geopolitical ambitions (Dodson, 2017; Wiig and Silver, 2019). Prevailing accounts of such infrastructure-led development (both critical and mainstream) have tended to emphasize the global infrastructure's central role in economic and spatial restructuring. In contrast, Vegliò et al.'s (2025) expansive intervention offers a welcome analytical reorientation. By foregrounding the situated dynamics and lived experiences of the present infrastructural conjuncture, their paper develops a compelling case that ‘the urban’ gives us something that a focus on ‘development’ does not. Bringing together five leading urban and infrastructure scholars is not a recipe for the deployment of a singular theory of the urban. Rather, the authors’ dialogical approach mines the epistemic richness of an open urban analytic, demonstrating the value of grounded comparative work and collective theory-building while illuminating diverse facets of our globalized and infrastructured urban world.

In this response, I make two connected points to elaborate and expand on Vegliò et al.'s agenda-setting contribution. First, while I appreciate the authors’ commitment to resisting fixed definitions and rigid urban categories, I see it as important to distinguish between infrastructure-led urbanization (as a structural process) and infrastructure-led urbanism (as the lived experiences that arise from such processes) in more explicit terms than their paper currently does. On one level, this is a point of conceptual clarification, but it does have analytical implications. As Merrifield (2002: 160) suggests, we are dealing here with two ‘epistemological moments within an ontological unity: one we experience – urbanism – the other we don’t – urbanization – but we know it really exists nonetheless’. From this standpoint, we can critically frame infrastructuring the urban and urbanizing global infrastructure as an integrated two-fold movement. Dialectically teasing out the specificity of these moments can develop a stronger sense of the connections, alignments, and comparative points of divergence between, for example, ‘Silk Road urbanization’ and ‘corridor urbanism’ while also disclosing the vital mediatory role global infrastructures play between broad, abstract social orderings and the concrete spaces and practices of everyday life (Addie, 2016).

Second, building on this distinction, I want to suggest how the notion of infrastructure time can deepen our appreciation of global infrastructure-led urbanization and vice versa. Infrastructure has long been studied through its spatial reach: how it links, fragments, and remakes territories. Yet infrastructures also profoundly organize, and are organized by, multiple urban temporalities, including future-oriented imaginaries, investment horizons, material lifespans, and lived rhythms (Addie et al., 2024). Indeed, while reading the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as a ‘spatial fix’ remains dominant across Vegliò et al.'s dialogue, temporal themes are implicit within many of their conceptual strategies, for instance, in calls to consider the genealogy of ‘dependent urbanization’ or excavate the past, present, and future conflicts internalized within ‘Silk Road urbanization’, as well as in recurring appeals to urban ‘becoming’. In the following, I aim to attune their analytic lens to the times of infrastructure-led urbanization and consider not only the impact that ‘global flows, economic forces, development policies, and social expectations conveyed by global infrastructure … on the places where they settle’ (Vegliò et al., 2025: 13, emphasis added), but also on when they settle and the temporal horizons they calibrate.

Visioning and timing infrastructure-led urbanization

So how might the production of time be imbricated in processes of infrastructure-led urbanization? What are the conceptual and political implications of analyzing the ‘temporal fix’ present in global infrastructure development? Focusing on global infrastructure-led urbanization brings to the fore modalities of futuring, timing, and tempo that shape the creation of urban infrastructural ‘timescapes’ (Adam, 2004). For instance, observing the fallout from the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, Schindler and Kanai (2024) identify a new global development phase driven by ‘infrastructural fundamentalism’; a political and policy conviction that inadequate infrastructural connectivity alone explains the failures of earlier neoliberal reforms. To mobilize the substantial capital required to address states’ (real or perceived) infrastructure deficits, this logic has greatly extended the time horizons over which urban futures are envisioned but also opened new challenges associated with the management of economic, political, and ecological risk: an essentially temporal problematic (Schindler and Kanai, 2024; Wiig and Silver, 2019). Misalignments emerge between long project timelines and short-term capital demands, which are frequently exacerbated by the accelerated tempo of infrastructural futuring. Infrastructure-led urbanization therefore raises questions about both spatial governance – getting the territory right (Schindler and Kanai, 2021) – and the temporal strategies and financial mechanisms utilized in attempts to de-risk investments and future-proof the profitability of (urban) infrastructure.

Attending to these issues involves examining how the state and aligned actors determine where infrastructure projects are initiated and when they materialize. Here, Datta and Hoefsloot (2024) frame the capacity to ‘time’ events as a crucial mode of statecraft. By managing temporal sequences and disruptions – practices of ‘timing’ – states aim to coordinate seemingly disconnected events across diverse spaces into a cohesive, forward-looking vision of the future. Through tools like centralized planning, governments do not just anticipate the future; they attempt, however imperfectly, to script it, ordering a narrative of teleological progress over the indeterminate contours of lived time. What then emerges, Ekman (2024: 135) contends, is a temporal feedback loop marshalled by the infrastructural state where glimpses of what could be loop back to reshape what was, transforming uncertain future visions into pre-determined certainties that legitimize and direct future development.

Infrastructure speaks in the future tense. Its multifaceted promises unfold across intersecting spatial and temporal scales, advancing speculative developments and alternative trajectories that simultaneously conform to and transcend the spatial and ideological frameworks of global neoliberal urbanism (Nowak, 2023) and the geopolitical machinations of competing infrastructural states (Anguelov, 2023). As Leitner and Sheppard (2023) argue, actors across the infrastructure-enabling field, from developers and financers to residents of informal settlements, engage in speculative urbanism through infrastructure, meaning that the futures of infrastructure-led urbanization are neither singular nor stable. The future shifts as an orientation (revitalizing ‘left behind places’), as a development strategy (e.g., digitally integrated smart cities or the BRI's geopolitical objectives), and as a varied time horizon (as evidenced in the continually deferred deadlines for achieving Net Zero or the existential immediacy of climate change mobilizing Just Stop Oil protests). Differing infrastructural futures may be held out on a utopian horizon or folded back in on ‘the now’ as a visceral ethical obligation to present and future generations. Past infrastructural futures might return to inform our actions (Moss, 2024). Others may be suspended indefinitely, manifest in more prosaic and incremental infrastructural interventions, or be repurposed through everyday acts of maintenance and repair (Glass and Addie, 2024; Gupta, 2018). Given that infrastructure inherently privileges certain futures while marginalizing others, research on infrastructure-led urbanization might productively investigate who imagines these urban-infrastructural futures, the instruments they employ, and the spatial scales and temporal horizons over which such visions are projected.

Infrastructural urbanisms as lived temporalities

Although global urban infrastructure projects are often driven by visions of the future, our concrete experiential interactions with these systems remain grounded in the present. As ‘corridor urbanism’ and ‘digital Silk Road urbanisms’ intimate, global infrastructure-led urbanisms reveal the ways in which infrastructure is lived in ‘the now’. Such conceptual and methodological approaches enable us to examine how the temporal and technological apparatus of global infrastructure-led urbanization foster emergent urban ways of life and, in turn, explore the tactics and strategies urban inhabitants use to challenge the dominant temporalities of infrastructure-led urbanizing – resisting, disrupting, and reappropriating time as a form of power from below.

Here, the intersection of infrastructure-led urbanism and infrastructure time presents some mutually generative lines of inquiry. To offer three brief examples: first, as infrastructures reconfigure everyday urban rhythms, they influence both how time is experienced across diverse spatial and social settings and reconfigure how people materially, socially, and politically relate to place over time. With this, the emergence of global infrastructure projects and the temporal patterns they produce co-constitute the emergent subjects and political formations that engage with these systems (Barak, 2013). This raises critical questions about how, for example, digital platform infrastructures and the immediacy of network time in ‘Digital Silk Road urbanism’ foster emergent/insurgent infrastructural publics and both manifest and exert constraints upon ‘infrastructural citizenship’ (Lemanski, 2020) as conceived and practiced by citizens and the state in space and over time.

Second, global infrastructures bypass or marginalize communities, reshaping their temporal experiences and perspectives. DiCarlo's (2024) ethnographic work along the Laos-China Railway illustrates how massive construction projects not only disrupt physical spaces but also the rhythms and expectations of daily life, exposing a stark contrast between the accelerated timelines of development and the slowed, suspended temporalities of those most affected. These mismatched temporalities – daily life and infrastructure development at ‘China speed’ – embed infrastructure into the fabric of everyday life, generating a dynamic tension between motion and stillness, advancement and delay, disempowerment and hope. This disjuncture invites deeper inquiry into how global infrastructure-led urbanization shapes the temporal experience of urban inhabitation and how individuals negotiate the seduction, coercion, and discipline of evolving infrastructural landscapes as subjects and agents of ‘temporal arbitrage’ (Datta, 2024): when is infrastructure a corridor? When is a corridor an infrastructure, and for whom?

Third, Simone (2025) argues that ‘untimeliness’ – being out of sync with dominant infrastructural timings – marks a temporal dynamic beyond infrastructure's capacity to facilitate emancipation and alienation, which characterizes much of urban Africa. He argues that the lived realities of infrastructural urbanism often unfold outside official timelines, manifesting in premature arrivals, delayed engagements, and asynchronous movements. These experiences occur within alternative temporalities, where formal rules, regulations, and customs are frequently bypassed in favor of ‘opportunistic exigency’ (Simone, 2025: 75). Urban life, shaped by overlapping and coexisting rhythms, therefore generates fragmented experiences of common social time, which coalesce into multifaceted, dynamic, and latent infrastructural ‘dispositions’ (Easterling, 2014). From the perspective of the untimely, we can ask: what aspects of lived infrastructural urbanism refuse capture, or are left unattended beyond the dominant spatio-temporal logics of global infrastructure-led urbanization?

Conclusion

These problematics reflect the generative and thought-provoking qualities of Vegliò et al.'s intervention. Responding to their call to extend this dialogue, I propose adopting an explicit temporal lens that can incisively illuminate the dialectical relations between moments of infrastructure-led urbanization and urbanism, including those within the authors’ conceptual strategies. Time, like space, is a social product, one that is both infrastructured and infrastructuring. Just as Vegliò et al. argue that infrastructure-led urbanization does not supersede or reject infrastructure-led development, my call to examine the temporal dimensions of global infrastructure, in concert with the authors’ own work, seeks to open alternative registers to critique the current infrastructural moment and navigate the dynamic processes involved in infrastructuring urban futures.