Article ID: CBB092260281

Railway Territorialities: Topology and Infrastructural Politics in Alpine Italy (December 2020)

unapi

Mateusz Laszczkowski (Author)


Transfers
Volume: 10
Issue: 2-3
Pages: 230-249


Publication Date: December 2020
Edition Details: Special section: On the promise and menace of Railroad Projects
Language: English

This 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 fieldwork in 2014–2015. I first describe how railways helped form modern sociality in Valsusa in the twentieth century. Subsequently, I explore contrasting topological effects 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 traffic “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.

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Associated with

Article Peter Schweitzer; Olga Povoroznyuk (December 2020) Introduction: Precarious Connections: On the Promise and Menace of Railroad Projects. Transfers (pp. 137-151). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB092260281/

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Authors & Contributors
Olga Povoroznyuk
Baatarnaran Tsetsentsolmon
Guillermo Guajardo Soto
Andrey Vozyanov
John E. Mohr
Peter Schweitzer
Concepts
Land transportation
Mobility
Technoscience; science and technology studies
Infrastructure
Railroads
Technology and society
Time Periods
21st century
20th century, late
20th century
Places
Romania
Russia
Estonia
Tokyo (Japan)
Mexico City (Mexico)
Ukraine
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