Infrastructural disorder: The politics of disruption, contingency, and normalcy in waste infrastructures in Athens

Abstract

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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Negotiating networked infrastructural inequalities: Governance, electricity access, and space in Rio de Janeiro

“…In a different way, but linked to this argument, research on repairs and maintenance also prompts us to reconsider certain assumptions of this ideal, including the "myth of order" embedded in such idealization (Graham and Thrift, 2007). By opening the black-box of infrastructural operations, this research shows how the performance, the functioning and the disruption of infrastructures are deeply embedded in the uncertainties and instability of the context in which they perform (Kallianos, 2017). This is why maintenance and repair operations and infrastructure disruptions in highly unequal societies can deepen and reveal urban inequalities (McFarlane, 2010;Silver, 2016), and how electricity providers deal with heterogeneity, including urban "informality" (Baptista, 2018).…”

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