Roadside and Travel Communities. Towards an Understanding of the African Long-Distance Road

我们的项目调查了加纳和苏丹的非洲长途公路制度，通过检查路边和旅行社区以及他们在进口技术的解释灵活性状态下相互作用所创造的社会技术秩序。该项目脱离了这样一种观点，即汽车道路及其使用规则和惯例，实际上是一种文化建筑。非洲之路借鉴了北大西洋模式，但我们之前的研究清楚地表明，在适应北大西洋模式的表面之外，还有很大的创造性重新解释和修改空间。作为一个指导概念，该项目使用了以前发展的“挪用”概念，这意味着技术及其意义在其转让过程中可以进行重大修改。因此，我们的项目有助于实现优先方案的主要目标，即了解非洲在道路技术及其各种使用者方面适应和创造的能力和方式。第一阶段的研究结果表明，非洲道路制度与北大西洋模式的不同之处在于，规划者和公路当局的监管能力较低，而在日常使用者方面，当地的创造力则有相应的高度自由。然而，我们也发现了现代化的道路空间，尤其是在世纪之交，非洲国家开始重新配置其道路制度之后。在第二阶段，我们转向假设地方拨款的自由度较低的情况。通过在我们的调查中引入控制比较，我们因此寻找可以测试地方代理限制和专有创造力条件的场景。接下来合乎逻辑的步骤包括：(1)巩固和保护我们的研究成果，从而(2)通过饱和我们新兴的中级概念，产生关于非洲道路建设的实质性理论，(3)将我们的案例和概念与PP中与主题相关的项目进行比较，(4)在PP层面上产生关于适应和创造力的主要形式理论。从而巩固了我们在前两个阶段取得的成果，并进一步对优先方案的总体分析概念作出系统的贡献。因此，我们期望为PP的主要目标做出贡献，并从非洲的角度重新制定全球汽车移动性的既定理论和美国道路文化的国际化。

Our project inquires into the regimes of the African long-distance road in Ghana and the Sudan by examining roadside and travel communities and the socio-technological orders created by their interaction in a state of interpretive flexibility of imported technologies. The project departs from the insight that motor roads, together with their rules and conventions for using them, are quite literally cultural constructions. The African road draws from North Atlantic models, but our previous research makes clear that beyond the surface of adaptation to North Atlantic models lie large spaces of creative reinterpretations and modifications. As a guiding concept, the project uses the previously developed notion of appropriation, which implies that technologies and their significations are open to significant modifications in the process of their transfer. Our project thus contributes to the main aims of the Priority Programme (PP) to understand the capacity and modalities for adaptation and creativity in Africa with regard to the technology of the road and its various users. Findings from the first phase show that African road regimes differ from North Atlantic models by low regulation capacities on the side of planners and highway authorities, with correspondingly high degrees of freedom for local creativity on the side of its everyday users. Yet we also find modernised road spaces, especially since, at the turn of the millennium, African states started to reconfigure their road regimes. In the second phase, we shifted towards cases where we assumed lower degrees of freedom for local appropriation. By introducing controlled comparisons into our inquiry, we thus searched for scenarios in which limits of local agency and conditions for appropriative creativity could be tested. The logical next steps consist in (1) consolidating and safeguarding our research results, thereby (2) generating substantive theory on the making of the African road by saturating our emerging mid-level concepts, (3) comparing our cases and concepts with those of thematically related projects within the PP and (4) generating primarily formal theory on adaptation and creativity on the PP level, thus consolidating our results from the first two phases and further developing a systematic contribution to the overarching analytical concepts of the Priority Programme. We thus expect to contribute to the main objectives of the PP as well as to the reformulation of established theories of a global automobility and the internationalisation of American road culture from an African perspective.