Railway Territorialities Topology and Infrastructural Politics in Alpine Italy
Laszczkowski M.
2021Berghahn Journals
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2021#10230 - 249 pp.
Th is article examines transportation infrastructures’ capacity to produce and transform social space through a focus on the contested history of railway development in Valsusa, Italy. I draw on participant observation and interviews with local residents and activists during ethnographic fi eldwork in 2014–2015. I fi rst describe how railways helped form modern sociality in Valsusa in the twentieth century. Subsequently, I explore contrasting topological eff ects of a projected high-speed rail through the valley. For planners envisioning a trans-European space of exchange, the railway is a powerful way to “shrink” space; for local residents, this implies reducing Valsusa to a traffi c “corridor.” Yet their protest generates new social relations and knowledges, giving rise to a notion of “territory” as unbound and connected to a transnational space of resistance to capitalist expansion.
high-speed railways , infrastructural conflict , infrastructure policies , Italy , social movements , transport infrastructures
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Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Warsaw, Astana, Kazakhstan
Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology
10 лет помогаем публиковать статьи Международный издатель
Книга Публикация научной статьи Волощук 2026 Book Publication of a scientific article 2026