Defining and Classifying Infrastructural Contestation: Towards a Synergy Between Anthropology and Data Science

The last decade infrastructure systems have been under strain around the globe. The 2008 financial crisis, the so-called fourth industrial revolution, ongoing urbanisation and climate change have contributed to the emergence of an infrastructural crisis that has been labelled as infrastructural gap. During this period, infrastructure systems have increasingly become sites of public contestation with significant effects on their operation and governance. At stake has been the issues of access to infrastructure, their social and environmental consequences and the ‘modern ideal’ embodied in the design of those socio-technical systems. With this paper we apply a cross-disciplinary methodology in order to document and define the practices of this new wave of infrastructural contestation, taking Greece in the 2008–2017 period as the case study. The synthesis of quantitative and qualitative datasets with ethnographic knowledge help us, furthermore, to record tendencies and patterns in the ongoing phenomenon of infrastructural contestation (This study is part of infra-demos project (www.infrademos.net), which is funded by a VIDI grant awarded by the Dutch Organisation of Science, PI: Prof. Dimitris Dalakoglou, Dept. of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam).