Universal access to infrastructure is one of the core ideals of modernity and is viewed as a symbol of development and progress. Infrastructures evoke imaginaries of material connectivity and uniformity (Lawhon et al, 2017, 725) and are supposed to provide the ‘closely choreographed intersection between technology, space and society’ that characterizes the ‘archetypical modern city’ (Gandy, 2004, 366). The identification of infrastructural ‘gaps’ across Africa and an expectation of potentially lucrative returns for capital (Goodfellow, 2020, 264) has driven international investments in both mega and smaller-scale infrastructure over the last decade. In Somalia and Somaliland, bilateral, multilateral and private organizations are currently investing in transport infrastructure, prominently seaports, airports and roads. These investments demonstrate the close intertwinement of geo-economic and geo-political interests, and, together with the rapidly growing emphasis on the management of global flows, are driven by the integration of capitalist production and circulation (Danyluk, 2017, 630– 1). The rise of logistics, along with a global focus on supply chain management and security, further contributes to investment in transport infrastructure across the globe. This also materializes in specific forms in the context of protracted insecurity across the Horn of Africa and international humanitarian and state-building interventions in Somalia (Bakonyi, 2022a).

Infrastructural gaps have been identified across Africa, where they are predominantly framed as a development problem (World Bank, 2010). Infrastructural development therefore features prominently in several of the United Nations’ sustainable development goals (SDGs), including SDG11 for the promotion of sustainable cities and communities. SDG11 sets out that infrastructure development should be promoted in ways that increase inclusivity and justice. Infrastructural development also plays an important role within the ‘durable solutions’ initiative, launched in 2016 as a comprehensive international attempt to deal with rapid, displacement-related urbanization in the Horn of Africa. Centrally planned and uniformly delivered infrastructure remains the dominant idea and aspiration within ‘durable’ urban planning.

The SDGs, ‘durable solutions’ and related schemes acknowledge that infrastructural development is neither necessarily inclusive nor automatically increases equality. Nonetheless, in their often technical (and thus depoliticizing) language, these initiatives appear to underestimate how tightly infrastructures are entangled with relations of power and shaped by struggles for rights and citizenship. Related to conflicts of land and property, infrastructures are, as this chapter shows, at the centre of everyday contestations over the ‘right to the city’ (Lefebvre, 1996).