Infrastructural flows, interruptions and stasis in Athens of the crisis

Abstract

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.

Key words:

• waste
• infrastructures
• ethnography
• Greece
• crisis
• Athens
• flows

Acknowledgements

We thank very much Anna Christofidi for helping us with this paper and various people in Fili, especially H. and D., moreover, many thanks go to Antonis Vradis, Christos Filippidis and Klara Jaya Brekke for their help.

Funding

Research for this paper was supported by the ESRC Future Research Leaders project the City at the Time of Crisis and the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-cultural Change (CRESC).

Notes

1 Those issuing such biopolitical statements were the current and former mayor of the city, the president of the merchants’ association, governmental ministers, corporate media journalists, etc. See http://news.kathimerini.gr/4dcgi/_w_articles_ell_100033_09/07/2011_448731; http://news.kathimerini.gr/4dcgi/_w_articles_politics_100017_09/07/2011_448709; http://www.skai.gr/news/greece/article/174513/protovoulia-kamini-gia-tin-plateia-sudagmatos/; http://www.newsbeast.gr/politiki/arthro/198924/prepei-na-katharisei-i-plateia-sudagmatos. For an analysis of Syntagma and protest in Athens during that period, see also Dalakoglou (2012a) and Kallianos (2013).

2 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-25454100

3 http://www.wtert.gr/attachments/article/271/%CE%94.%CE%A3.%CE%91.%20%CE%95%CE%BB%CE%BB%CE%AC%CE%B4%CE%B1.pdf

4 http://www.kathimerini.gr/491991/article/epikairothta/ellada/apovlhta-apo-mykono-ston-xyta-ths-fylhs

5 http://www.europarl.europa.eu/meetdocs/2009_2014/documents/peti/dv/dt942577_/dt942577_en.pdf

6 http://www.edsna.gr/index.php/info/press-romm-2/354-nosokomeiaka-6

7 Cremation was illegal in Greece until 2006 because of pressure applied by the Church of Greece.

8 This is almost inevitable since the law was reformed in the 1990s allowing only companies of a certain size to undertake mega-infrastructure constructions. For almost a decade the very few such companies saw their profits increase immensely, yet the crisis and pause in public works led to the survival of only two such companies.

Additional information

Dimitris Dalakoglou is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Sussex University.

Yannis Kallianos is Research Fellow at CRESC at Manchester University. Email: [email protected]