Infrastructural grids and the disappearance of the rural
Valeria Monno, DICATECh, Polytechnic of Bari (Italy) – email [email protected]
This paper argues that in a period of planetary urbanisation regional planning needs to draw on the
web of conflicts and narratives emerging in relation to the infrastructural reorganisation of rural
territories. Flowing through different multiple political dimensions and direct and indirect actions,
such a reorganisation is profoundly changing the rural landscape, generating more or less impressive
migrations and constructing new asymmetrical and unjust relationships between the urban and rural.
I develop the discussion focusing on some protests emerged in Italy as a reaction to infrastructural
megaprojects. These are: the NO TAV (NO-Treno Alta Velocità) protest in northern Italy, the NO
TAP (No-Trans Adriatic Pipeline) protest in southern Italy, and protests of small towns opposing the
dismissal of local railways. Although classified as environmental conflicts, these protests are land
conflicts questioning the rural-urban interplay necessary to the growth of the neoliberal city. These
contestations narrate the infrastructural reorganisation taking place in rural territories as a powerful
process of dispossession and displacement which change the rural-urban interplay by obliging local
population to bargain their rural lives with the sustainable concentrated although unlimited expansion
of the neoliberal city.
While many academic debates increasingly focus on the rural–urban interplay within the conceptual
and physical borders of the sustainable neoliberal city, the infrastructural reorganisation of rural areas
is generating dispossession and displacement processes and transforming rural lands into dead
territories even in Europe. By challenging the rationality and taken for granted necessity of
infrastructural reorganisation, these narratives highlight the need to question concepts such
governance, connectivity, innovation and metropolitan development. Usually part of the hidden,
background of regional planning, these concepts sustain and justify any kind of infrastructural
reorganisation of rural territories and the following processes of dispossession and displacement and
concentration of land in the hand of the few.
At the same time, these protests call for a new generation of regional planning which take seriously
the right to rural life by drawing on an idea of sustainable urban-rural interplay as embedded into the
protection of non-urban ecologies and ways of life, protection of small agricultural production and a
new meaning of land intended as a common resource belonging to a place and deserving ethics
beyond the exchange.