Making megaprojects: the practices and politics of scale-making

Abstract

The world is currently experiencing a surge of investment in, and development of, large-scale infrastructural building projects, frequently captured by the term ‘megaprojects’. Distinguished by the bulk of their envisioned materiality, the volume of financial capital required to build them, and the complexity of technical, legal, administrative, and political tools needed to bring them into operation, megaprojects do not easily lend themselves to ethnographic inquiry. While in recent years, ethnographic attention to infrastructure has given rise to a burgeoning theoretical apparatus and a growing anthropological subfield in which the superlative aspects of megaprojects have been analysed, the concept of scale has been less theorised to in relation to this. By exploring megaprojects from a variety of locations and angles, the contributions reveal how scales are dynamically produced and what the social, political and aesthetic implications of scale-making are. This special issue aims to contribute to critical anthropological engagements with the practices, politics and concept of scale to further understand the contemporary allure of megaprojects to governments, corporations, experts and citizens.