What Happened to the Trash? Political Miracles and Real Statistics in an Emergency

Giacomo D'Alisa , Marco Armiero

What Happened to the Trash? Political Miracles and Real Statistics in an Emergency
Abstract:

At the turn of 2007 and 2008, the waste crisis in Campania was reaching one of its recurring peaks. While Naples was flooded with trash, the communities chosen to host new waste facilities resisted harshly; at its extreme, the political unrest manifested itself in dramatic urban riots with buses hijacked and set on fire and Molotov cocktails hurled at the police and political party offices. Garbage and politics were revealed to be entangled more clearly than perhaps ever before; according to several observers, it was on the barricades of Pianura-- a working-class neighborhood that fiercely opposed the reopening of the local landfill-- that Mr. Prodi's center-left fovernment fell, demonstrating its inability to deal with either the waste crisis or the citizen's protest.