Infrastructural flows, interruptions and stasis in Athens of the crisis

The paper discusses infrastructural flows enacted/activated in the context of the crisis in Athens, focusing on waste flows and treatment. The argument is that disorder and deregulation, which are reflected in the disruption of patterns and flows, are endemic characteristics of the neo-liberal governance, but also of the wider infrastructural existence. Considering such activations of flows as working parallel with de-activations and the crisis-related arrhythmia of social, economic and political processes, the paper attempts to offer a re-reading of the crisis via some of the key urban infrastructural processes. In this regard, the diverse codifications of waste flows at play are explored anthropologically as infrastructural processes that reflect both an institutional and an informal social shift in the urban scale.