The Future is Always on the Other Side

FOOTPRINT, vol. 20, pp. 133–52

Abstract

This visual essay builds on collaborative and interdisciplinary research on infrastructure development as part of the Leiden-Delft-Erasmus project ‘Sea-ing Africa: Tracing Legacies and Engaging Future Promises of “Big” Infrastructure Projects in Port City Regions in Ghana and Morocco’, as well as on Costanza Franceschini’s long-term ethnographic research on Sino-African infrastructural entanglements. The photographs were captured during four fieldwork trips to Morocco and Ghana between February 2023 and May 2025, and portray some of the infrastructures that are the object of our study and the subject of discussion with our research interlocutors. The analysis of infrastructure development as a socio-political terrain characterised by disconnection, suspension, incompleteness and disruption suggests that, rather than engendering distrust in a specific developmental model, infrastructural unevenness produces a constant mechanism of temporal shift, in which the future promised and dreamed of is perpetually out of reach.

Authors 2

1. Costanza Franceschini Aachen

   Leiden University

   Affiliation as printed

   Leiden University

2. John Hanna

   Delft University of Technology

   Affiliation as printed

   TU Delft