Ghostlines: Movements, Anticipations, and Drawings of the LAPSSET Development Corridor in Kenya

Abstract

The Lamu Port-South Sudan-Ethiopia-Transport (LAPSSET) corridor is a partly completed development corridor in Kenya that will connect the eponymous places via roads, pipelines and railway lines, if completed. This thesis investigates how inhabitants of the traversed area navigate and shape the spatio-temporal landscape of the corridor, following three motifs: lines created through moving, anticipating, and drawing. Under moving, the thesis explores people’s encounters of LAPSSET as connection, obstacle, and repulsion, relying on mobile ethnography. In anticipating, the thesis introduces ‘spectral landscapes of anticipation’ to investigate different temporalities people create in relation to the corridor. In drawing, it considers ways of visualizing and envisioning infrastructure projects and introduces Collaborative Comic Creation as a possibility to cut through the visual normativity of infrastructural megaprojects.