Speaker
Description
The contribution refers to the PRIN “Italia di Mezzo” and proposes the exploration of the Sacco Valley as an emblematic synthesis of the tensions between social and ecological dimensions that characterize the territories of Italy in-between metropolises and inner areas. In a territory marked by a century structured over time around various sectors, the river stands as a structuring axis and a witness to global and local transformations. The infrastructures of the Valley - such as the canal systems, the industrial development policies, the road network that fragments territories and local cultures - materialize forms of exclusion and privilege, revealing the intrinsic asymmetries in the development processes. These infrastructures, although often perceived as abstract entities functional to the connection of flows, possess a materiality and symbolic weight that anchor them deeply to the territory. They are devices that amplify inequalities. Divested of its vital function and reduced to a "stream of unconsciousness," the Sacco River is reduced to a symbol and vector of pollution, otherwise forgotten and excluded from everyday life. It becomes a point of the intersection between environmental and socio-economic marginality: an impoverished actor of an unsustainable development model, the offspring of extractive logics and industrial reconversion. The Valley, a significant part of which is within the boundaries of an area identified by the national government as being of significant environmental concern, requiring special environmental remediation and restoration measures, tells now a history of new extractive trends that are being distributed in the seemingly empty space left by the broken promise of growth. The Sacco Valley becomes a laboratory to investigate socio-ecological justice, where the frictions between promises of industrial well-being and the disillusions of that development model converge: how to rethink infrastructures for a vision that considers the right to space for all forms of life? What territorial configurations can foster alternative and emancipatory coexistences? How can policies and projects address inequalities, not only material, but also symbolic and cultural? The relational value of infrastructures and the plurality of subjectivities that inhabit the territory (human and more-than-human communities) require renegotiating the territorialization of transition also as a process in which it is necessary to clarify and reposition rights, avoiding forms of compensation that perpetuate unequal access to collective resources.
| Keywords | infrastructures; intermediate territories; socio-ecological justice |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
