Breathing new futures in polluted environments (Taranto, Italy)

Abstract

This paper analyses the ways that young people create new futures in Taranto, Southern Italy, a city hosting one of the largest and most polluting steel factories in Europe. It draws on ethnographic fieldwork in Taranto and uses storytelling to understand how young people – a minority of residents aged between 24 and 35 years – shape futures in industrially polluted environments. The study weaves together geographic and anthropological scholarship about futures in (post‐)industrial cities, conceptualisations of breathing as well as lived experiences in highly polluted areas. Through mobilising the notion of breathing, we highlight the embodied, entangled, and emotional dimensions of the young people's everyday practices and develop our concept of “breathing new futures.” We argue that both pollution and the envisioning of a new future become visible in everything the study's participants do; the ways they promote environmental awareness, take care of animals, or seek to foster children's education. By focusing on generational differences, the study expands on recent scholarship analysing environmental pollution in relation to intersectional identities such as race, ethnicity, and gender, and sheds light on the activities of young people to imagine and live new futures in polluted environments.

Way‐finding agendas through Transactions

“…In overlapping ways with immobility regimes, inequalities embodied in spatial relations are also increasingly indexed in the journal by papers addressing their intersectional political‐ecologies with health and environmental concerns. Senanayake (2022), Jokela‐Pansini and Militz (2022), and Murrey and Mollett (2023) all give their attention to liminality and intersectionality, resulting in nuanced approaches to understanding how identities intersect with ecological challenges and environmental pollution. This nuance encapsulates more‐than‐human and affective political‐ecologies.…”

“…Environmental justice has long been a critical concern for geographers keen to examine how issues of space, place, and inequality intersect, thereby influencing both human and environmental well‐being (Bullard & Wright, 1986; Edwards et al., 2016; Pearce et al., 2010). Using a storytelling methodology, Jokela‐Pansini and Militz (2022) explore how young people's capacity (or lack thereof) to breathe in the city of Taranto, Italy, exposes environmental pollution's deeply personal and embodied dimensions. The role of geography in and for these dimensions is made apparent through Jokela‐Pansini and Militz's analysis, as it is the everyday experience of breathing and the tangible quality of the air itself in Taranto that intimately connects the residents to the polluted urban environment, operating at the most visceral scale.…”

“…The role of geography in and for these dimensions is made apparent through Jokela‐Pansini and Militz's analysis, as it is the everyday experience of breathing and the tangible quality of the air itself in Taranto that intimately connects the residents to the polluted urban environment, operating at the most visceral scale. The authors’ attentiveness to the visceral and material is particularly insightful, because it helps to convey how ‘everyday practices are embodied/material, entangled with (non‐)human environments, and emotional/affective’ (Jokela‐Pansini & Militz, 2022, p. 743), which can often be overlooked in conventional analyses. This aligns with critical and feminist geography that has consistently emphasised that an individual's intimate encounters with polluted environments is important for comprehending the wider consequences of pollution beyond health‐related impacts (Pulido, 1996, 2017).…”

“…This aligns with critical and feminist geography that has consistently emphasised that an individual's intimate encounters with polluted environments is important for comprehending the wider consequences of pollution beyond health‐related impacts (Pulido, 1996, 2017). Jokela‐Pansini and Militz (2022) are also keen to highlight the seemingly mundane forms of resistance to this situation in Taranto. This is crucial, both intellectually and from an activist perspective, as it provides an opportunity to think through the complex interplay between environmental degradation, social justice, and community mobilisation.…”