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This introduction provides an initial approach to the conceptual framework of infrastructural harm. It draws upon existing scholarship to discuss infrastructures as relational arrangements co-formative of harm. By approaching infrastructures as sites of ongoing socio-political and environmental antagonism, we pay attention to the ways in which infrastructural harm is generated, accretes, and transmutes across different scales and contexts. We consider harm as a process that exceeds the (in)direct consequences of infrastructure operation to extend to other arrangements. Building upon the diverse case studies discussed in this special issue, we investigate how the political and necropolitical properties of infrastructures are entangled with different technologies, judicial forms, policies, regulations and everyday processes. By foregrounding these diverse manifestations of infrastructural harm, together with its material and immaterial expressions, we expand on the existing literature in order to further explore critical codifications of contemporary socio-technical arrangements.

This paper investigates the entanglements of waste infrastructures and harm in the wider Athens region. It focuses on Fyli landfill, which is currently the only formal waste management facility to serve the entire region. Associated with pollution, privatization, and allegations of corruption, the landfill has been formative of differential modes of uncertainty, interruption, and (in)visibility. By paying attention to the infrastructural contestation surrounding Fyli landfill, we conceptualize waste infrastructures as techno-political devices that engender harm. Our paper, first, examines the ways in which the spatio-temporal modalities of harm play out within this context, and secondly, rethinks modes of contestation and (in)visibility in relation to urban infrastructures. It argues that thinking through harm further elaborates the complex enmeshment between spatio-temporal and moral dynamics of infrastructures and forms of disruption, accountability, and participation. Hence, while we rethink waste infrastructures through harm, we also attend to the infrastructural codifications of harm.

In this paper, we put forward an examination of the interconnections between public space, the everyday, and the event in order to rethink the spatiotemporal modalities of political action. Recent mass mobilisations and civil unrest events around the globe have brought to the fore the complex relationship between political practices and public space. These indicate a critique of representative democracy, authoritarian governance, and precarious living conditions, as well as entailing new ways of doing and conceptualising politics. Our paper approaches the production and (re)configuration of public space through a spatiotemporal analysis of collective action based on the events that took place in Athens, in December 2008, and in Tottenham, London, in August 2011. By considering the everyday socio-political dynamics of public space as formative of radical political practices, we also pay attention to its evental (re)production. Such a process, we argue, entails the potentiality for rupture, contestation and radical imagination. Publisher PDF

Since the eruption of the Greek crisis in 2010 it has been almost impossible for the Greek state authorities to initiate any infrastructural project without significant local and wider resistance. In this paper we seek to answer how infrastructures became novel arenas of political conflict in Greece. We suggest that crucial for understanding this process is the dynamic relationship between infrastructures and popular political imaginaries. During the recent ‘golden’ period of infrastructural development in the country (mid-1990s to mid-2000s) there was a mutually constitutive relationship between popular imaginations of progress and the materiality of infrastructures, which attempted to underplay the disjunctive modernization processes within which that development took place. Later though, this parallel relationship between the two was contested as the infrastructural imaginary, which was transformed by the everyday discourses and practices created around infrastructure projects, blurred the expectations and imagination ascribed to the ‘glorious’ period of national success and modernization. In combination with the infrastructural gap of the crisis, the narrative dimension started taking over the materiality of infrastructures allowing it to take on a life of its own. Understanding the mechanisms of this relationship between imaginary and infrastructural materiality is key to comprehending the Greek economic crisis without a crisis essentialism that attributes every process into the crisis per se.

This paper considers infrastructure from the point of view of disorder. During the last few years, waste management controversies have proliferated in Greece, reflecting a generalized feeling of mistrust towards the authorities. In this context, and in relation to the socio-economic crisis that erupted there in 2010, a set of diverse and even antithetic practices, imaginations, and circulations of flows have (re)emerged around waste treatment processes. By looking at the intermingling of formal and informal practices around waste flows and landfill processes in Athens, the paper asks how uncertainty, contingency and instability shape the governance and everyday experience of waste infrastructures. Examining the ways in which the normalization of regular disruption and instability plays out in waste treatment in Athens, it makes the case for understanding disorder as inherent to infrastructure.

This chapter identifies the particular codifications of legitimation in the Greek crisis during 2010-2014. It explores the ways in which the state attempts to justify its authority and governance strategy; consequently, it asks how modalities of legitimation have been redefined and articulated in the context of a wider neoliberal economic and political restructuring. The chapter suggests that past events of public contestation have shaped discourses, practices and imaginations of state delegitimation in times of crisis. It focuses on how notions and discourses of uncertainty have been employed by the state. The chapter argues, that the discourse 'to get out of the crisis' has mobilised the implementation of 'law and order' by the state to discipline the 'social body'. The political objective is not simply to criminalize the social groups, but to delegitimise them. Nevertheless, this is an essential part of state reengineering.

The paper discusses infrastructural flows enacted/activated in the context of the crisis in Athens, focusing on waste flows and treatment. The argument is that disorder and deregulation, which are reflected in the disruption of patterns and flows, are endemic characteristics of the neo-liberal governance, but also of the wider infrastructural existence. Considering such activations of flows as working parallel with de-activations and the crisis-related arrhythmia of social, economic and political processes, the paper attempts to offer a re-reading of the crisis via some of the key urban infrastructural processes. In this regard, the diverse codifications of waste flows at play are explored anthropologically as infrastructural processes that reflect both an institutional and an informal social shift in the urban scale.

L’obiettivo dell’articolo e quello di analizzare le pratiche, i processi e le interpretazioni dei codici di legittimita ed illegittimita che intervengono nella costruzione dello spazio pubblico ad Atene in tempi di crisi socio-politica. Nell’articolo si tenta di identificare come la discontinuita, la frammentazione e l’incertezza riguardo al futuro condizionano le politiche relative allo spazio pubblico. Sulla base dell’analisi delle diverse esperienze che danno forma allo spazio pubblico ad Atene, l’articolo sostiene che gli attuali interventi urbani neoliberali sono parte di un piu ampio progetto di "ristrutturazione" dello stato, servendo inoltre a riaffermare la legittimita delle autorita istituzionali di fronte al cambiamento.

The dynamic of the street in political struggles is not to be found merely in the fact that it is the space for visibility and representation, but also in that it is the space where potential emancipatory action and non-mediated modes of social conduct can play out. This paper will examine this notion of the street in the context of events of unrest and crisis in Athens from 2008 until 2012. The paper argues that the irregular changes of social, economic and political features in the city during that period transformed public space from primarily a ‘space for representation’ and a ‘space of representation’ to the site/space allowing the subversion of social relations in times of crisis.

The article explores the recent social and political transformations in Greece through events of collective action in the public space of Athens. Drawing on Richard Sennet’s notion of the ‘myth of the purified community’ it is argued that these events demonstrate a gradual disintegration of the social imaginary of the idea of community in various scales (national, local, etc). This argument builds on the indistinction between public and private as reflected in these events in Athens. By providing ethnographic examples from both before and after the economic collapse, the article explains crisis as a long process of contesting the sovereignty of the state and institutions in Greece and how these previously downplayed contestations were rendered visible in the Greek public sphere. This visibility shakes the foundations of the notion of a homogeneous community as it is established by the ‘social contract’.