‘Eating mountains’ and ‘eating each other’: Disjunctive modernization, infrastructural imaginaries and crisis in Greece

Dimitris Dalakoglou*, Yannis Kallianos

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to JournalArticleAcademicpeer-review

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Abstract

Since the eruption of the Greek crisis in 2010 it has been almost impossible for the Greek state authorities to initiate any infrastructural project without significant local and wider resistance. In this paper we seek to answer how infrastructures became novel arenas of political conflict in Greece. We suggest that crucial for understanding this process is the dynamic relationship between infrastructures and popular political imaginaries. During the recent ‘golden’ period of infrastructural development in the country (mid-1990s to mid-2000s) there was a mutually constitutive relationship between popular imaginations of progress and the materiality of infrastructures, which attempted to underplay the disjunctive modernization processes within which that development took place. Later though, this parallel relationship between the two was contested as the infrastructural imaginary, which was transformed by the everyday discourses and practices created around infrastructure projects, blurred the expectations and imagination ascribed to the ‘glorious’ period of national success and modernization. In combination with the infrastructural gap of the crisis, the narrative dimension started taking over the materiality of infrastructures allowing it to take on a life of its own. Understanding the mechanisms of this relationship between imaginary and infrastructural materiality is key to comprehending the Greek economic crisis without a crisis essentialism that attributes every process into the crisis per se.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)76-87
Number of pages12
JournalPolitical Geography
Volume67
Early online date19 Oct 2018
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Nov 2018

Funding

We must thank a series of people and institutions who contributed to this article in different ways. Firstly, we would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers of Political Geography for their constructive comments, along with Kevin Grove and Phil Steinberg, the journal's editors. Moreover, Anna Christofides and Christos Giovanopoulos whose critical comments and disagreements contributed significantly to the ideas developed here. David Harvey, Julia Elyachar and AbdouMaliq Simone also discussed with us some of the ideas of this paper and we would like to thank them. This paper was written as part of infra-demos.net project, funded by a VIDI Innovative Research Grant awarded by the Dutch Organization of Scientific Research (NWO, 2017–2022), and located at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam . We would like to thank our colleagues in the department for their intellectual and practical support. Part of the fieldwork and writing for this article was done by Yannis during his postdoc fellowship in Käte Hamburger Kolleg/Centre for Global Cooperation Research at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany and another part was conducted by Dimitris funded with an ESRC Future Research Leaders grant (2012–2014) and Princeton University's Seeger Fellowship (2017–2018).

FundersFunder number
Dutch Organization of Scientific Research
Princeton University
Economic and Social Research Council
Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek
Universität Duisburg-Essen

    Keywords

    • Contestation
    • Crisis
    • Disjunctive modernization
    • Greece
    • Imagination
    • Infrastructure
    • European cities
    • infra-demos
    • infrastructural gap

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