ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the after-effects of an experiment in urban planning. Urbanisation was equated with development as a means of rendering rural populations more amenable to state-led industrialisation and as the embodiment of modernist aspirations of efficiency and rationality in their own right. The chapter is based on ethnographic work in two of the resettlement townships, including archival research and interviews with planners and other experts. It traces the experimental logics that were central to the project's inception, before examining how these persist both as a set of now decaying material infrastructures, and as a series of aspirations and ideologies. Key elements of this high-modern approach were the promotion of social and economic development through the creation of planned urban spaces, technological modernisation of agriculture, and technologically driven industrialisation, notably linked to the power produced by the dam. The townships were thus differently constituted as experimental sites in relation to a range of epistemic interests.
