Catching trains to China at the “gateway to Europe”: an urban and local exploration of the Belt and Road Initiative in Eastern Poland | Wojciech Kębłowski (VUB, ULB)
This work focuses on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a global infrastructure development strategy announced by the Chinese government in 2013. Thus far, the BRI has been analysed primarily through a geopolitical, political economic, cultural, and environmental lens, with strong attention paid to the role of nation-states and their institutions. Instead, I explore BRI as an inherently urban and local project. To unravel its contradictions, I focus on the particular locality on the BRI map: the village of Małaszewicze. Located in Eastern Poland, just a few kilometres from the Poland/Belarus border, Małaszewicze is the site of one Europe’s most important logistical hubs. An entry point to the European Union, and a connection between European-gauge and Soviet-gauge railway systems, Małaszewicze is an obligatory stop for many freight trains linking up Europe and China, dubbed the China-Europe Express. Relying on interviews with local actors, ethnographic observations, and photography as research method, I look at how the BRI materialises “on the ground”. I explore what local interests it represents and opposes, who advances and contests it, how it relates to local economy and urban development. Located in one of the EU’s poorest and “least developed” regions, supposedly suffering from an important “infrastructure gap”, Małaszewicze's "bet" on the BRI is narrated as a glimpse of future modernity and prosperity — without considering the stark power assymetries, unevenness and coloniality of the development this strategy heralds.
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Wojciech Kębłowski is an uban researcher and photographer interested in bringing together critical decolonial theory and transport geography. He studies the political economy and governance of “sustainable” transport policies, transport in/formality, and publicness of public transport. He is particularly curious about practices of fare evasion and control, and the policy of fare abolition, otherwise known as fare-free public transport. A more recent project of his looks at logistics and localities of the Belt and Road Initiative.
Affiliation: Cosmopolis, Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Institut de Gestion et d’Aménagement du Territoire, Université Libre de Bruxelles