Infrastructuring mobilities in the Greater Bay Area: the rise of infrastructural regionalism at the conjuncture of polycrisis

At the conjuncture of multiscalar polycrisis – marked by global economic downturn, technological rivalry, geopolitical frictions, and pandemic disruptions – the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA) has become a testing ground for an infrastructural fix to reconfigure cross-border regionalism. Moving beyond a distributional lens, this paper introduces a mobility perspective, viewing territorial-institutional and socio-spatial disparities not as obstacles to be rectified, but as productive asymmetries strategically leveraged by the state via infrastructural interventions to animate innovation-driven regional economies and orchestrate cross-boundary governance. We conceptualize such dynamics as infrastructuring mobilities and identify three distinct forms in the GBA. The mirrored form replicates and relocates Hong Kong’s academic infrastructures into mainland cities, generating routinized flows of students, researchers and symbolic capital. The integrated form entails the rescaling of access to social infrastructure (e.g. education, healthcare, and eldercare), enabling cross-border daily commuting, short-term visits, and long-term migration. The enclaved form consolidates diverse infrastructural functions within spatially bounded megaprojects, channelling inflows of capital, talent and knowledge to transform these enclaves into strategic nodes of innovation and productivity amid regional economic restructuring. Above all, this paper contributes to new regionalism and critical infrastructure studies by explicating infrastructuring mobilities as an emergent form of statecraft. To unpack its underlying features, we resolve infrastructuring mobilities into technological, discursive, and affective dimensions of governance in a regional context. This paper concludes with a brief reflection on the conjunctural approach as a heuristic for theorizing infrastructural regionalism, wherein infrastructuring mobilities can be operationalized as a mid-level concept.