1st Edition

Assembling Bus Rapid Transit in the Global South Translating Global Models, Materialising Infrastructure Politics

By Malve Jacobsen Copyright 2021
    252 Pages 20 Color Illustrations
    by Routledge

    252 Pages 20 Color Illustrations
    by Routledge

    This book explores the mobile ethnography of Dar es Salaam, where consultants and politicians have planned and implemented a bus rapid transit (BRT) system for two decades. It analyses the dual processes of assembling BRT in the Tanzanian metropolis and establishing BRT as a policy model of and for the Global South.

    The book elucidates how policy models are constructed and circulated around the globe and depicts the processes by which they are translated between, and materialise within, specific contexts. It presents the case of BRT to demonstrate how technocrats shape these processes through persuasive work aimed at disseminating and stabilising this transport model, and how local actors influence its adaptation in Dar es Salaam. The book adopts a ‘double mobility’ approach to show how this ethnography follows travelling consultants, circulating policies and moving buses to explore the fluidity of the BRT model. Linking key debates in policy mobility studies and Science and Technology Studies, enriched with postcolonial perspectives and geographies of transport and infrastructure, it offers new insights into the technopolitics of planning and implementing infrastructure systems.

    This book will appeal to academics and students of human geography, transport studies, science and technology studies, and African and development studies interested in the technopolitics of transport planning.

    1. Introducing Bus Rapid Transit 2. Gathering DART 3. Fluid Formations 4. Creating the Model of the Global South 5. Effective Operational Controversies 6. Permanent Interim Assemblages 7. To Conclude: Assembling BRT in the Global South

    Biography

    Malve Jacobsen is a geographer specialising in urban and transport studies, Science and Technology Studies, and the relationships between Global South and North. She pursued BA and MA at Humboldt University Berlin and PhD at Goethe University Frankfurt, and currently holds a postdoc position at the University of Bonn.