Re-framing machinic landscapes. Crises and conflicts of an infrastructural nature between the mountain and the plain Elena Longhin Università IUAV di Venezia Dipartimento di Culture del Progetto Email: elena.longhin1@iuav.it
Abstract As a piece of larger research which focuses on the exercise of power over water resources, the following contribution aims to explore the rationalities of the Piave river course - the most engineered hydro basin in Europe to understand how its infrastructural development have transformed and dictated the larger geographies of the Italian Veneto region. Exploring the multiplicity of processes of rationalization of the territory and the interplay of socio-transformations of the alpine area, it seeks an understanding of the territorial, urban and social implications of the politics of appropriation and exploitation of water. Bisecting the region through a valley-section, it describes how its embedded dynamics of production - would they be energetic, of agriculture, of abstraction – are closely entangled, and consequentially dependent upon, the ecologies of specific spaces, often seemingly disconnected or remote. In doing so, it explores the alternative uses of water across the river and how the mountain-plain reciprocal nature is challenged by the emerging environmental crisis, questioning the social, political, institutional and ecological dynamics that the machinic landscape entails across the territory. Key words: climate change, urbanism, ecology
1 | Introduction «Because people have failed to understand the rules [of urban development], the countryside has been emptied, cities have been filled beyond all reason, concentrations of industry have taken place haphazardly, workers’ dwellings have become hovels. Nothing was done to safeguard man. The result is catastrophic…It is bitter fruit of a hundred years of the undirected development of the machine. » Le Corbusier, The Athens Charter 1957. The Great Acceleration is reaching criticality. The capitalist form of planetary urbanization and the processes associated with the urban metabolic - symbiotic - relationship with nature have been recognized as drivers of anthropogenic climate change and recently came in global public concern (Swyngedouwn 2017). The long-distance interactions between urban infrastructure and distant territories that support cities are a planetary formation based on appropriation and resource extraction. These ‘non-city’ spaces have undergone internal political-economic operations and spatiotemporal dynamics, entangled with the construction of the city environment, which have increasingly altered ecosystems, establishing intensively machinic operational landscapes. By ever-greater scales of social and material exchange, many of these spaces, through ever-more intensive productive dynamics, have been systemically re-territorialised, as extended urban systems, dictating socio-ecological crises (Brenner and Elden 2009; Ellis 2014; Sheller and Figuerosa 2017; Brenner and Katsikis 2020). Within this frame, this contribution explores how the modern socio-economic formations dictated the territorialisation of distant - and often considered marginal – landscapes, focusing on the entanglements, and their consequential conflictual dynamics, between the mountain and the plain of the north-east of Italy. Within the specific geographical context of the Veneto region, the paper focuses on the valley section of the Piave hydro basin to uncover regional relations between urban environments and productive landscapes of hydropower and cultivation. 2 | An emerging conflictual nature Among the many ongoing processes of environmental crisis, the warming condition has – as Malm argues - a “special inner propulsion and potential”: representing “history and nature falling down on society” it
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Resilienza nel governo del territorio. A cura di Brunetta G., Caldarice O., Russo M., Sargolini M. Planum Publisher e Società Italiana degli Urbanisti, Roma-Milano 2021 | ISBN: 978-88-99237-31-8 | DOI: 10.53143/PLM.C.421
