Envisioning African Futures: Development corridors as dreamscapes of modernity

This critical review paper scrutinizes development corridors as ‘dreamscapes of modernity’ and showcases of ‘future-making’. I argue that corridors have become dominant blue-prints for spatial development because of a specific way in which they express, perform and implement ‘desirable futures’. I refer to three strands of conceptual debates. The first discusses how futures are ‘made’ and can be empirically approached through practices of future-making. The second looks at imaginations of African futures in relation to images of the continent itself. The third takes the empirical example of development corridors in Africa to scrutinize their meaning as ‘dreamscapes of modernity’. At the end, I will revisit recent calls for closer integration between economic geography and development studies, to which I suggest to add a concern for post- and decolonial positions and ‘theory from the south’.