Summary

Mining company towns and workers’ villages in Central Africa, inhabited by thousands of mine‐ workers and families, insightfully picture how difference between race, class and gender was spatialised through various building politics, protocols and materials. This chapter aims to highlight the complex and diverse ways the concept of ‘race’ was deployed and impacted in spatial planning. It explores company settlements and policies as apparatuses of layered trans‐imperial connections and circulations that turned cross‐fertilised expertise in space and architectural design into key tools for consolidating power. The multi‐scalar networks participating in these concessions are here examined to surpass the still dominant state‐centred frames of analysis which fail to disclose the strength of transnational connections, while allowing to assess the role of other experts in empire building. Located in‐between borderland areas, private enterprises became significant fields of experience and translation for architectural models and construction techniques, thus pushing research to move beyond dichotomic approaches towards more polyhedral perspectives.

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