Infrastructuring Regions at Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers

J.P. Addie (Georgia State University)

From the banks of the Detroit River to the peaks of the Himalayas, NOIR took to the 2025 AAG conference (March 24-28, 2024) to interrogate how infrastructure emerges in different regions and their interconnected relationship with broader regionalization processes.

A sunset view of Detroit, host city for the 2025 AAG annual meeting.

Infrastructures, whether physical, digital, or institutional, play a crucial role in shaping regional space, connectivity, and mobility. Taking inspiration from the AAG Meeting’s setting in Detroit, NOIR organized a series of sessions exploring infrastructure’s role in co-constituting regional territories, corridors, and networks across borders. Thinking regionally about infrastructure – an approach we term ‘infrastructural regionalism’ – an excellent ensemble of established and early-career researchers addressed the diverse ways in which infrastructure is governed across or constrained by jurisdictional boundaries, whether at intra-metropolitan, sub-national, or international scales. Across three well-attended panels, the notion of infrastructuring regions brought together new and original research that teased out the complex interactions between infrastructure development, regional integration, and mobility across borders. This included asking who drives the construction of regional infrastructural imaginaries examining the funding, decision-making, and institutional apparatus governing the movement of people and goods at various scales, and engaging how key actors, institutions, and communities understand and experience the infrastructuring of regional space.

The State of Infrastructural Regions

The first panel foregrounded the role of the state in infrastructuring regional space, with papers provide a diverse collection of Asian perspectives. Dylan Brady (National University of Singapore) examined how Southeast Asia’s digital payment platforms are expanding beyond national borders, forming regional and global networks through bilateral linkages and multi-platform infrastructures. His study examined Malaysia’s role in these developments, focusing on DuitNow, a state-backed real-time payment system, and Touch’nGo, an e-wallet developed in partnership with Alibaba. Two key trends emerged: strong state involvement, with platforms either government-established or jointly operated with private entities, and asymmetric cross-border payments, where transactions often flow one way or are limited to specific types. Brady’s analysis therefore both illustrated the dynamics of Southeast Asia’s uneven digital payment infrastructure and the enduring influence of state power in monetary systems. Next, Yimeng Yang (Northeastern University) presented on his developing doctoral research, which examines the state assestization of waste in China. Starting in 2014, when Guangzhou issued an Incineration Bond to fund the transition from landfills to waste-to-energy infrastructure in the newly established Nansha New Region, Yang argued that local governments in China have shifted under post-2008 financial re-regulation to increasingly leverage financial instruments for infrastructure development, often at the expense of socio-ecological goals. He then articulated a threefold framework – encompassing state-controlled waste ownership, spatial revaluation strategies, and community-driven waste extraction – to explain this process, while pointing to the disruptive role played by informal grassroots “waste commoning” initiatives.

I-Chun Catherine Chang (Macalester College) – presenting on behalf of her co-authors Sue-Ching Jou (National Taiwan University) and Ming-Kuang Chung (Academia Sinica) – shifted our attention to the role of smart city policies in reshaping urban spaces, creating technical networks, data governance regimes, and imagined city-regional integration. In Taipei, these changes challenge territorial and political relationships, sparking conflicts among governments, private sectors, and civic groups over policy, funding, regulation, and data management. The central government views smart cities as national strategies, while Taipei uses them for political autonomy. Private actors seek profit, while civic groups advocate democratic participation. These mismatched interests served to highlight governance tensions, driving a re-territorialization process that restructures Taiwan’s urban development and smart technology ecosystem. The first session concluded with Ryan Centner (LSE) providing a strong connecting thread between state infrastructuing of the production of networked corridor space. His paper examined the “Island Hopper”, one of the few airline routes connecting multiple Pacific archipelagoes from Honolulu to Guåhån (Guam). Through archival and participant-observation research, Centner detailed how aviation infrastructure, logistics, and governance shape territorial dynamics in Micronesia in material, political, and affective terms. The Island Hopper fosters a network of material and symbolic connections affecting development in the Marshall Islands and the Federated States of Micronesia, despite limited promotion, but in doing so, it also reflects geopolitical tensions and ambiguous territorial relationships among U.S.-affiliated Pacific nations, influencing regional integration and mobility.

Borders, Corridors, and Networks

Our second session featured three highly synergetic papers examining the contested construction of infrastructural space. Alberto Valz Gris (Politecnico di Torino) utilized the concept of corridor urbanism to interrogate the multiple urban geographies that emerge with the making of extended infrastructural networks. His paper drew from ethnographic research in and around the port of Genoa to analyze the frictions and collaborations among key actors involved in infrastructural corridor-making. Amid Genoa’s restructuring – especially its breakwater redevelopment to attract ULCVs – Gris argued regional imaginaries of connectivity drive corridor formation, driven in large part by concerns with supporting favorable trade dynamics. By exploring the tensions within corridor urbanism, this paper helped redefine the political stakes of infrastructure beyond simplistic hegemonic or subaltern classifications. Joining us remotely, Pilar Delpino Marimon (Clark University) offered a compelling assessment of unbuilt infrastructures and their effects in the Peruvian-Brazilian borderland. Her qualitative fieldwork illustrated how the unbuilt Pucallpa-Cruzeiro do Sul transboundary corridor – a stalled Western Amazonian infrastructure project meant to connect Brazilian production zones with Peruvian ports – exposes the complex politics, and affective experiences of speculation and anxiety, shape territorial governance. As a symbolic and discursive (rather than physical) infrastructural artefact, the corridor weaves together state and beyond-state authorities including protected areas, indigenous reserves, settler zones, and illicit activities, that profound impact multiscalar governance, despite its unbuilt status. Finally in this session, Wojciech Keblowski (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) took us the transshipment ports on the Poland-Belarus border that constitute the “gateway to Europe”. Focusing on Małaszewicze and Narewka – two ports initially built for Soviet-era trade but now central to China-Europe geo-economic relations – Keblowski offered a novel interpretation of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) materializes as an infrastructural, urban, and colonial project. Marrying an exploration of geopolitical interests and place-based transformation (and inertia) embedded within these corridors, this paper captured profound tensions between imagined prosperity and persistent structural inequalities and old and new infrastructural fixes uneasily overlap.

Reimaging Regional Infrastructure

The final group of papers investigated the promise and potential of retrofitting, remaking, and reimaging regional infrastructure. To start off, NOIR’s own Michael Glass (University of Pittsburgh) presented a paper co-authored with Jean-Paul Addie (Georgia State University) on the potential for regional infrastructure to act as a development fix. Focusing on regional transportation planning in the United States, in particular the work of the Southwestern Pennsylvania Commission (SPC), Glass called for a regional perspective on infrastructural change. With fragmented decision-making hampering cohesive planning for sustainability and equity, this presentation highlighted pressing challenges in navigating incremental and radical change while exploring regional strategies that move from reactive fixes to proactive solutions fostering equitable urban futures through integrated infrastructural systems and imaginaries. John Stehlin (UNC-Greensboro) also focused on the promise and obduracies of urban transportation infrastructure, focusing on the dynamics of highway removal in Spain. He argued that while urban highways have long caused environmental, social, and economic harm, their removal has only recently gained attention in infrastructural politics. Spanish cities have altered highways built during the Franco era, generating tensions between local needs and broader transport systems. Stehlin’s paper homed in on the contested politics surrounding tunneling projects for Madrid’s A-5 and Bilbao’s A-8 and the difficulties of addressing environmental burdens while maintaining vital commuter and freight links. His cases revealed the contradictions of highway transformation, where efforts to improve urban life clash with regional and supranational transport demands.

Rescaling and resituating over geographic imaginaries, Katharine Rankin (University of Toronto) and Dinesh Paudel (Appalachian State University) introduced the idea of ‘Himalayan infrastructuralism’ which indicates a paradigm shift in development from “social engineering” empowerment to building infrastructure in Nepal. The current conjuncture – shaped by Nepal’s response to devastating earthquakes in 2015, the institution of a federal republic in 2015, and the country joining BRI in 2017 – offered a distinct window to assess how smaller states have leveraged infrastructure to reshape regional dynamics. While Chinese investment challenges India’s historic dominance and the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) offers a competing framework, Rankin and Paudel considered Nepal’s potential to assert its own agency within the competing infrastructural regionalisms of an evolving multipolar global order. Concluding NOIR’s sessions at the AAG, Keith Harris (University of Washington) offered a robust exploration of the transformation of transportation infrastructure into third places for culture and ecological sustainability in Paris and Île-de-France. Harris, in particular, focused on institutional third places, analyzing their relationship with municipal and regional governance, bioclimatic urbanism, and nonprofit organizations and situating these evolving infrastructures within broader urban and environmental discourses.

NOIR’s AAG sessions fostered a robust and engaging exploration of regional infrastructuring, exploring questions regarding the impacts of infrastructure development on economic, social, and environmental sustainability in cross-border regions, the policy frameworks and governance structures that facilitate or hinder cross-border infrastructural projects, and the capacity of a variety of infrastructures to enhance cross-border mobility and regional integration. There’s much food for thought here which we are excited to digest through the NOIR network. For now, we’d like to extend our thanks to all the presenters and participants in Detroit!