Going nowhere fast: infrastructure, place and power in the western Italian alps

This thesis is about the power of infrastructure to make and unmake places, and about how territories are claimed and reclaimed through the exercise of sovereign rule and the forms of resistance it encounters. It follows the contested territorialisation of infrastructure megaprojects in Valsusa, an Alpine valley in Italy's Northwestern region of Piedmont, between the regional capital of Turin and the French border. The main megaproject that I address is the new Turin-Lyon railway line (NLTL), a flagship EU infrastructure project that is set to be completed in the 2030s, and that has been heavily challenged by the local No TAV movement in Valsusa since the 1990s, primarily on environmental grounds. Building on the ethnography that I conducted in Valsusa between 2020 and 2022, the thesis highlights a friction in how the concept of territory is understood, at once as the material, felt and perceived fabric of everyday life, but also as an administrative unit of government and subjection. The thesis aims to explore the intersections and tensions that emerge when these ideas of territoriality begin to overlap. How is our perception of (and presence within) a territory related to the territory’s inscription within a broader matrix of territorial control and government? How are sovereign claims to a territory reflected in material transformations in the everyday experience of that territory? How, in turn, do local publics articulate an alternative set of claims that challenge and subvert forms of sovereign rule? Further, what practices of commensuration, representation and speculation are deployed to bring into being these different hierarchies of claims? I explore these contested processes of infrastructural territorialisation in Valsusa by looking firstly at the NLTL’s place within a broader apparatus of state power that actively claims presence upon the Valsusan territory, and by looking at the alternative forms of presence that are claimed at the margins of the project. I also explore how the NLTL and other projects are perceived in relation to the territory, and the forms of visibility that are articulated by promoters and critics. Lastly, I examine these contested processes of territorialisation through the forms of valuation and speculation that are mobilised around the NLTL. Ultimately, the thesis highlights a profound shift in the meaning of sovereignty in Europe today, at a time when the power of the state is becoming increasingly entangled with the imperatives and capabilities of the market.