Infrastructures, Spectacle, and the Politics of Logistical Enchantment in Post-Industrial Liège

In post-industrial Liège, the ruins of steel capitalism have given way to a logistics-driven urban imaginary centered on the transformation of airport infrastructure into a regional freight hub. This has gone through the institutionalization of logistics. This paper interrogates how logistical infrastructures function not only as technical systems but as discursive and affective projects—embodying promise, persuasion, and political violence. Drawing on ethnographic research, interviews, and spatial policy analysis, we explore how the conversion of Liège Airport into a strategic node for logistics and global e-commerce (with actors such as FedEx and Cainiao) mobilises a seductive language of “reconversion,” “innovation,” and “European hub status,” re-enchanting deindustrialized territory through techno-economic spectacle.
Yet beneath this narrative of progress, we analyze how this logistical poetics aiming at facilitating the circulation of goods, people and capital, simultaneously hollows out democratic participation, displaces residents, and reshapes labour precarity. Following Larkin (2013) and Anand et al. (2018), we conceptualize these infrastructures as promising forms that both invite and betray publics: generating hope, while silencing certain voices and claims, and accommodating with violence. The resulting contestations—from environmental resistance to critiques capitalist development—reveal how infrastructures not only enchant but govern, not merely by rationalizing territory, but if not by aestheticizing by technicizing dispossession and by making it appear inevitable. It argues that in the case studied here, infrastructure becomes not only the materialization of economic transition, but a performative regime where spectacle is both governance tool and site of contestation.
By situating logistical infrastructure within the broader framework of globalized urban redevelopment, this paper contributes to debates on how infrastructure mediates political expectation, and territorial reconfiguration. The materials mobilized for this paper include official documents, maps of economic activity zones, the fruit of interviews with a variety of public, private and civil society players, as well as press articles. This work is part of a research project entitled “A sociology of logistics in the industrial basin of Liège” (2024-2026).