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.

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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.

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