Why the same network fails again: governance traps, megaproject planning and speculative urbanism in Jordan’s Amra City

This paper combines an Actor-Network Theory (ANT) analysis of Jordan’s Amra City – a 500,000-dunum greenfield megaproject announced in late 2025 – with a comparative diagnostic across three prior Amman planning episodes, asking not merely whether this network will stabilise but why structurally similar networks have repeatedly failed to do so. Tracing processes of translation through government documents, policy analysis and historical planning scholarship, the paper shows how state authority is reconfigured through delegated, financialised and projection-dependent arrangements. Building on prior work on governance traps in Jordanian planning contexts, it develops three ANT diagnostic criteria: a non-durable obligatory passage point; competing unreconciled problematisations; and non-human actants that black-box contested assumptions. The paper contributes an ANT-based diagnostic framework for identifying recurrent planning-network fragility before project failure becomes visible, and demonstrates that Amra reproduces governance-trap conditions rooted in Jordan’s political economy of planning rather than in project-specific failure. It further suggests that governance traps may be politically functional rather than simply planning failures, preserving state discretion while deferring binding spatial commitments.