Introduction

Research on infrastructure – from roads to railways and dams to economic zones – is marked by an interest in space: how projects connect, disconnect, and transform places and regions. However, as this volume attests, infrastructure is inherently spatio-temporal: an assemblage of planning, promise, flows of materials and capital, and embodied experiences. What truly struck me throughout my research on the Laos– China Railway (LCR) were the divergent ways in which interlocutors perceived and expressed time in relation to infrastructure. State officials and planners discussed timelines and project plans, focusing on swift construction completion and successful project operation, emphasizing future potential and profit. In media reports, percentages of project completion took centre stage: Lao Deputy Prime Minister Sonexay Siphandone announced that ‘nearly 80 percent of the railway construction was complete’ (Xinhua, 2019); and the Phnom Penh Post (2021) reported when the Luang Prabang railway station was ‘about 45 percent complete.’ Alongside promises of connectivity and modernity, temporal framings of the railway position most people in Laos as spectators on the sidelines, waiting to see if the LCR will deliver on promises made by the government: to integrate Laos into the regional and global economy and lift local people out of poverty. This state of anticipation constitutes a broader imagined future for the country, which is not necessarily part of daily life.

In contrast, for residents in the shadow of infrastructure, the railway was ever-present, disrupting their daily lives and generating both anticipation and uncertainty about the future. They navigated between infrastructural ‘speeds’ and ‘suspensions’ in relation to railway construction. Rather than awaiting a promised future with no present consequences, those in the path of construction experienced railway time as an intimate state of suspension and stasis as, for example, land, homes, burial areas, and farms were no longer accessible, and residents had to wait for information, some form of redress, or compensation for their losses. Ambiguity in project plans further elongated experiences of suspension, which were compounded by the fact that the railway project had disrupted traditional land use years before the start of construction. This overwhelming sense of stasis sharply conflicted with planners’ project visions, pointing to the limitations of relying on project time as the primary mode of understanding the complicated, uneven rhythms and times that surround construction (Addie, this volume).