UGOD Seminar | Infrastructuring mobilities in the Greater Bay Area: Effectuating infrastructural fix at the intersection of housing, education and healthcare

Evolving from the headstream of China’s market-oriented reforms—the Pearl River Delta, the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA) emerges as a strategic development area and a super-size extended metropolitan region in Southern China comprising 11 cities and over 86 million population. At the conjuncture of multi-scalar polycrisis—marked by economic downturn, technological rivalry, geopolitical frictions, and pandemic disruptions—the GBA has become a testing ground for an infrastructural fix to reconfigure cross-border regionalism. Regional integration and accelerated mobility are the key emphases of the GBA, which are highly contingent upon infrastructure development of various sorts. Such a strategic infrastructural fix liquidizes the otherwise fixed infrastructure and its substrates to facilitate mobilities within the GBA, initiating a process I called infrastructuring mobility. Among various critical social infrastructures, housing, education and healthcare are of great importance for promoting physical and social mobilities, and thus at the center of the infrastructuring process. I will illustrate how the state-orchestrated institutional innovations and entrepreneurial endeavours under the changing state-capital nexus initiate and facilitate such process of infrastructuring mobility. By illuminating how the politics of mobility—embedded in the technological, discursive and affective governance of infrastructural regionalism—serves as a mode of statecraft that forges cross-boundary connectivity and drives regional integration.