AAG 2025: Infrastructuring Regions: Borders, Corridors, Networks

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, in this session we are interested in exploring infrastructure’s role in co-constituting regional territories, corridors, and networks across borders. Thinking regionally about infrastructure – an approach we term ‘infrastructural regionalism’ (Addie, Glass, and Nelles, 2020) – involves addressing how infrastructure is governed across or constrained by jurisdictional boundaries, whether at intra-metropolitan, sub-national, or international scales. We seek to bring together new and original research that explores the complex interactions between infrastructure development, regional integration, and mobility across borders. This includes 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. Regional infrastructure covers the gamut from traditional sectors such as transportation, ICT, energy, and water/waste to emergent research on smart cities, informality, and urban political ecologies. As such, this session is open to conceptual, methodological, and empirical interventions from a variety of geographic, infrastructural, and theoretical perspectives. Relevant themes include, but are not limited to:

The role of transportation and communication infrastructures in enhancing cross-border mobility and regional integration.
Impacts of infrastructure development on economic, social, and environmental sustainability in cross-border regions.
Policy frameworks and governance structures that facilitate or hinder cross-border infrastructural projects.
Case studies and comparative analysis of successful or problematic cross-border infrastructure initiatives.
Theoretical approaches to understanding the interplay between infrastructures, regionalism, and mobility.
Technological innovations and their influence on cross-border infrastructural developments.
Evolving shifts in infrastructural policy, supply chains dynamics, economic development, and regional mobility following the COVID-19 pandemic.
 

Mobility

For the Mobile Lives Forum, mobility is understood as the process of how individuals travel across distances in order to deploy through time and space the activities that make up their lifestyles. These travel practices are embedded in socio-technical systems, produced by transport and communication industries and techniques, and by normative discourses on these practices, with considerable social, environmental and spatial impacts.

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Movement

Movement is the crossing of space by people, objects, capital, ideas and other information. It is either oriented, and therefore occurs between an origin and one or more destinations, or it is more akin to the idea of simply wandering, with no real origin or destination.

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Please send 250-word abstracts to jaddie@gsu.edu by October 17. Include the title of your paper, the names and affiliations of all authors, and contact information for the corresponding author. We will notify participants regarding acceptance by October 23.

This session is supported by the Regional Studies Association Research Network on Infrastructural Regionalisms (NOIR). To find out more about NOIR, visit the network’s website (www.noir-rsa.com) and follow us on Twitter/X @NOIR_RSA.