Seeking justice in risk landscapes. Small data and toxic autobiographies from an Italian petrochemical town (Gela, Sicily)

ABSTRACT

This paper provides a re-signification of industrial risk as a slow-burning issue (Mah [2017] “Environmental justice in the age of big data: challenging toxic blind spots of voice, speed, and expertise.” Environmental Sociology 3 (2): 122–133.), invisibly and violently diffusing across time and space and affecting relational entanglements between human and non-human components of risk landscapes. As an alternative to a planning approach based on quantitative and objective data, the authors propose to build strategic planning of riskscapes upon what they call small data, that is, the ensemble of qualitative and embodied data that can be gathered through street science (Corburn [2005]. Street Science: Community Knowledge and Environmental Health Justice. Cambridge: MIT Press.) and toxic autobiographies (Armiero et al. [2019]. “Toxic Bios: Toxic Autobiographies – A Public Environmental Humanities Project.” Environmental Justice, 1–5. ). In order to discuss the potential role of both small data and toxic autobiographies in the planning field, the authors present the results of an ongoing empirical case study in Gela, a Sicilian town converted into one of the main Italian petrochemical poles in the 1960s by a multinational oil company. The authors analyse Gela’s risk landscapes through the perceptions of citizens and their initiatives to tackle environmental injustices. Finally, the authors argue that small data can provide a better understanding of the landscape of risk through four lenses that allow seeing the slow and diffused change brought by industrial risk: memories of injustice, memories of smell, trans-corporeal stories, and relational stories.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental injustice
• industrial contamination
• Sicily
• small data
• toxic autobiographies

Acknowledgments

We want to thank all the associations and residents who have allowed meetings, clarifications, and interviews during the research fieldwork. Thanks to all reviewers and editors for their helpful comments. Furthermore, we thank the C.M. Lerici Foundation, which has supported a visiting scholar exchange between the two research centres involved in this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 ENI is the acronym of Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi (National Hydrocarbons Authority) that is an Italian multinational oil and gas company, created by the Italian state as a public body in 1953, then converted into a joint-stock company in 1992. It is considered one of the seven "Supermajor" oil companies in the world.

2 We have borrowed and reformulated this definition from the marketing analysis literature. According to Martin Lindstrom (2016) small data is seemingly insignificant observations you identify in consumers’ homes, is everything from how you place your shoes on how you hang your paintings.

3 In this paper the concept of “subalternity” is not strictly referred to the original Gramscian meaning related to proletarian workers and peasants, rather to a general interpretation regarding "any “low rank” person or group of people in a particular society suffering under hegemonic domination of a ruling elite class that denies them the basic rights of participation in the making of local history and culture as active individuals of the same nation" (Louai 2011, 5).

4 According to Brian Wynne (1996, 21) "the fundamental interaction between scientific expert and lay-publics is cultural, in that scientific knowledge embodies social and cultural prescriptions in its very structure".

5 According to Funtowicz and Ravetz (1992) in order to bridge the gap between scientific expertise and a concerned public, an extended peer community that uses extended facts is needed. Extended facts “include even anecdotal evidence and statistics gathered by a community" (1992, 254). Extended facts "go beyond that purely subjective base. There will also be anecdotes circulated verbally, as well as edited collections of such materials prepared for public use by citizens' groups and the media. These will not usually be in traditional scientific form, but they may be essential for establishing a prima face case for the existence of a problem and, therefore, the urgency of systematic research.” (1992, 271-272).

6 Through the comparison between four case studies, Jason Corburn (2003, 429) demonstrates that “local knowledge can also make normative contributions to environmental planning. One such contribution is toward enhanced procedural democracy, which occurs when previously excluded and marginalised voices are included in the technical research and decision-making process.”

7 According to Cathy O'Neil (2016, 3) "models encode humans prejudice, misunderstanding, and bias into the software systems (…) [and] they tend to punish the poor and the oppressed in our society, while making the rich richer."

8 The Toxic Bios is a public environmental humanities project that aims to coproduce, gather, and make visible stories of contamination and resistance (Armiero et. al. 2019). Website: http://www.toxicbios.eu

9 According to Istat (2018, 2020) 10% of the residents in Southern Italy live in a state of absolute poverty, whereas in Northern Italy it is 6%, and the average in Italy is 7%. The percentage of early leavers from education and training is around 19% in the South, 12% in the North, and Italy’s average is 14.5% (Istat 2015). The rate of unemployment is around 18% in the South –one of the lowest in the European Union, 6% in the North, whilst the national average is 10%, similarly, the youth unemployment rate (15-24 years) is about 50% in the South, whilst the Italian average is 29.6% (Istat 2019).

10 Hypospadias is a congenital defect in which the opening of the urethra is on the underside of the penis instead of at the tip.

11 “U stabilimentu” is a Sicilian dialectal word that can be translated into “the factory” or “the plant”. This nickname shows how the local community has considered for a long time the petrochemical as the factory par excellence of the area of Gela.

12 According to Salvo Messina's research in another Sicilian petrochemical area (2005), the bivalent behaviour of residents and farmers regarding contamination, working places, and health causes engenders “landscapes of schizophrenia.”

13 Decree-law in Italy should be used for urgent legislation only.

14 The SNOX system was set inside the plant of Gela in 1999 for removing sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and particulates from flue gases. However, since 2012 the production of pet-coke has passed under the European jurisdiction, which has placed many limits on its production, in 2017 the plant has interrupted to process the pet-coke.

15 Our impression is that the committee dissolved due to internal conflicts and to the lack of a common goal and strategy. Some of the activists wanted the name “NoENI” because it clearly indicated the culprit of the perpetrated injustices, considering the name “Decontaminate Ourselves” too neutral.

16 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSjqDBYIZCA

17 According to Stefania Barca (2014, 8) scholars “should engage with a stronger ethical commitment, a sense of what is needed in order to give European societies a better history – one capable of accounting for that huge amount of environmental devastation and related human suffering that has yet to be told, understood and accorded some justice”.