https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9547-2657
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ABSTRACT
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.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to our research participants without whom this research would not have been possible, as well as to Charidimos Pappas who created the map that we include in this paper. We are also thankful to the anonymous reviewers who provided insightful comments and suggestions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 In 1991, the other landfill also located in West Attica (in Schisto), was shut down.
2 Such normalized paradoxes have been considered as co-formative of modernity. Beck (Citation1992, p. 21) argues that we live in a society permeated by risk, which is ‘a systematic way of dealing with hazards and insecurities induced and introduced by modernisation itself’. If, however, risk ‘is a way – or rather, a set of different ways – of ordering reality, of rendering it into a calculable form’ (Dean, Citation1998, p. 25), harm is not a settled category (Liboiron et al., Citation2018, p. 333).
3 In numerous places, especially in the ‘global South’, infrastructural arrangements are permeated by uncertainty and visibility (Chu, Citation2014, p. 365).
4 The Ano Liosia Landfill I began to operate in 1997. A new facility opened in 2003 which was referred to as Phase 1. Phase 2 started in 2006. See: https://www.kathimerini.gr/society/971194/to-chali-den-kryvei-alla-skoypidia/ (accessed 10 August 2021).
5 Fyli municipality, where Fyli landfill is situated, has approximately 45,000 residents. It is a new municipality that was created during the Kallikratis 2011 national administrative reform, and it brings together three previously separate municipalities (Fyli, Ano Liosia, and Zefyri).
6 Egaleo mountain, which consists of two major ranges, Egaleo and Poikilo, crosses a large section of west Athens.
7 We learned to pay attention to these spatiotemporal dynamics of the landfill through discussions with several participants in the local movement. They often noted the role that Egaleo mountain plays in creating a sense of distance between the landfill and Athens.
8 West Attica is also full of very significant archaeological materialities. However, for many decades the authorities have largely neglected these in order to facilitate the heavy industrialization of the area.
9 Kuchinskaya (Citation2014, p. 67) discusses the ‘symbolically overloaded, dramatic, and even hyperbolic representations’ of harm in relation to the Chernobyl disaster as a process of ‘hypervisibility’.
10 Schwenkel (Citation2015, p. 523) explains that ‘[c]oncealing infrastructure beyond our daily sensory perception (i.e. its deliberate invisibilization) thus emerged as a novel technical and aesthetic imperative of late capitalism’.
11 We are referring here to the environmental report that ESDNA itself published in 2018 as well as to other studies. See: https://www.edsna.gr/perivallontiki-parakoloythisi-metriseis/ (accessed 10 August 2021). See also: https://www.tanea.gr/2007/01/25/greece/toksiki-bomba-katw-apo-tin-attiki/ (accessed 10 August 2021).
12 See: https://fyli.gr/apantisi-se-analithes-kai-sykofantiko-dimosieyma/ (accessed 10 August 2021).
14 Gille (Citation2007, p. 18) notes that ‘by breaking up the concept of waste and spreading it over dictionary entries on distinct tasks of “waste management”, the waste problem is presented as not only manageable but already being managed, thus solved (Gourlay, Citation1992)’.
15 See: https://fyli.gr/anoichtos-ilektronikos-diagonismos-me-titlo-anaplasi-kai-axiopoiisi-apokatestimenon-kyttaron-chda-chyta-ano-liosion-fylis-dimioyrgia-perivallontikoy-parkoy-kai-parkoy-ananeosimon-pigon-energeias// (accessed 10 August 2021).
16 From 1991 until Greece joined the eurozone in 2001, these offsets were being paid in drachma. According to activists the total amount paid via offsets since 2000 is approximately 600 million euros. See: https://www.efsyn.gr/ellada/koinonia/263949_o-dimos-fylis-zita-kai-ta-resta (accessed 10 August 2021).
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Notes on contributors
Yannis Kallianos
Yannis Kallianos is a Research Associate at the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield (UK).
Dimitris Dalakoglou
Dimitris Dalakoglou is a Professor of Social Anthropology and co-director of the research lab on Infrastructures, Sustainability and Commons at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (The Netherlands).