Contested Airport Land: Social-spatial Transformation and Environmental Injustice in Asia and Africa

Contested Airport Land draws attention to the accelerating airport development in the Global South. Empirical studies provide nuanced analysis of socioeconomic, administrative, and political dynamics on the land beyond the airport grounds, such as the project area of greenfield development, the airport city, or land resources reserved for future airport expansion.

The authors in this book emphasise why airport construction is a politically sensitive issue in low-income and low-middle-income countries, which serve as the last development frontier of the aviation sector. They argue that observed airport development was rather motivated by the perception of airports as engines for national economic growth, while improving air mobility of national populations was not the main driver. Under dominant national development visions, airport-induced dynamics threatened local livelihoods by triggering economies of anticipation, the reconfiguration of land markets, rapid land use changes, a transition from rural to urban livelihoods, the displacement of communities, the perpetuation of human–wildlife conflicts, or inter-ethnic violence. The authors also highlight colonial path dependencies; legal pluralism in land tenure; the hegemonic relations between builders, investors, and the affected residents; as well as strategies of local protest movements.

This book is recommended for readers interested in infrastructure-induced conflicts and environmental injustice.

Chapter 1, Chapter 6 and Chapter 8 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA) 4.0 license.

Irit Ittner is working as a senior researcher in the Programme Environmental Governance at the German Institute of Development and Sustainability in Bonn. Her research interests include unplanned urbanisation, land tenure, social navigation, and processes of transformation in coastal West African and European cities. Irit published on the airport land in Abidjan in Afrika Focus (2021), Urban Forum (2022), and Afrique Contemporaine (2023).

Sneha Sharma works as a junior project manager at the ICON Institut in Cologne after having conducted research at the University of Bonn (2015–2022). Her lived experiences growing up in the busy streets of Kolkata, India, shaped her interest in urban sociology and ethnographic methods. Sneha published Waste(d) collectors: Politics of urban exclusion in India (2022). Her work on spatial transformation, affordable housing, and urban renewal in the airport villages of Mumbai were published in Geoforum (2023).

Isaac Khambule is a professor of political economy at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. He was previously an associate professor of political economy at the Wits School of Governance, University of the Witwatersrand, where he taught decision-making in public institutions and worked as a senior lecturer at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Isaac´s research interest is in the relationship between the state, institutions, and development, with a particular focus on the role of the state in economic development and the entrepreneurial state.

Hanna Geschewski is a doctoral researcher in Human Geography at the Chr. Michelsen Institute (CMI) and the University of Bergen in Norway. Her research focuses on the socio-ecological dimensions of displacement and resettlement in South Asia, with a particular interest in human-land relations. Her work on the unfinished airport project in Nijgadh, Nepal, co-authored with M. Islar, was published in the Journal of Political Ecology (2022).