ABSTRACT
Introduction In 2007, reports about an urban refuse crisis in the southern Italian city of Naples began to circumnavigate the globe. Over the next four years the international media frequently featured stories and images of a city submerged beneath mounds of uncollected garbage, and overrun by popular and at times violent protests. What was actually the climax to a long-running waste emergency that had been officially declared in 1994, the escalating drama was compounded by the self-realization that the city and its trash had now acquired international newsworthiness. For Peter Popham in The Independent, the planetary attention appeared to confirm an apocalyptic diagnosis: ‘the fear is that the Naples disease, which has put its rubbish-clogged streets on the world’s news bulletins and newspapers day after day, is beyond cure’ (Popham 2008). Meanwhile, Italy’s mainstream press and politicians were concerned that foreign interest in the city’s trash had spiralled out of control, reaching national audiences that were not usually included in their North-Atlantic-centric vision of a ‘globalized’ world. Hence, Goffredo Locatelli lamented in La Repubblica that ‘the ugly images of Naples and its surroundings have ended up on the front pages of the world’s newspapers, from Peking to New York, Tel Aviv to Montevideo’ (Locatelli 2008). The key issue here is not that the global media exaggerated the gravity of the problem but that its coverage was universally characterized by serious misconceptions and omissions. Analysts in Italy have detailed how the crisis was the upshot of corporate malpractice and institutional complicity that prioritized a money-spinning but unworkable plan centred on incineration, and that organized crime, although intent on exploiting the situation, was not a determining factor (Gribaudi 2008; Rabitti 2008). In stark contrast, the international media – from the world’s leading liberal dailies such as The Guardian, The New York Times, El País, Le Monde, and Süddeutsche Zeitung to the press of emerging nations such as Brazil, China, and India – invariably conflated the breakdown of the city’s refuse disposal system with the separate issue of toxic waste dumping and, by inverting cause and effect, pointed the blame at the city’s criminal organization, the Camorra. Similarly, newspapers tended to interpret local people’s
participation in anti-landfill and anti-incinerator protests as under the sway of organized crime or as incontrovertible expressions of Nimbyism that blocked a viable solution to the crisis, while environmental activists’ arguments for the causes of the crisis and their counterproposals went unreported. It is important to note that although the Italian mainstream press was generally more attuned to the institutional and legal contexts of the garbage crisis, its reporting of events was likewise marked by inaccuracies and – especially in the case of the protests – by the crude stereotyping of Neapolitans. However, the fact that local and national media coverage was itself the focus of widespread public criticism (Gribaudi 2008; Petrillo 2009) was a sign that, at least in Italy, the crisis was a contested issue. The aim of this chapter is not simply to highlight the international media’s failure to accurately tackle Naples’s refuse crisis. Such an exercise would certainly be important insofar as the predominant global storyline has not been subjected to serious scrutiny (although see Dines 2013 for the British press) and because the same false claims and omissions have sometimes filtered into scholarly discussions of the affair.1 Rather, the more pressing and interesting task here is to attempt to understand why a particular version of events became so dominant and uncontested at a planetary level. Dissecting the coverage of the Naples refuse crisis raises broader questions about the visibility and invisibility of garbage in the global arena. It also compels us to engage with the politics of waste governance. Reformulating Mary Douglas’s famous refrain that dirt is ‘matter out of place’, we need to appreciate how the rightful place of garbage is not fixed, but rather the site of agonistic dispute. The first part of the chapter briefly charts the evolution of the refuse crisis and the concomitant rise of an environmental movement that challenged urban waste governance, before proceeding to illustrate the news frames commonly used to report events in Naples during the period. The second part of the chapter explores three interconnected reasons that are seen to have shaped representations of the refuse crisis. First, the coverage is considered a corollary of shifting global media flows and, more specifically, of the ways in which foreign news is constructed. Second, the media’s particular depoliticized take on the garbage crisis can be understood to reflect what geographer Erik Swyngedouw (2010) has termed a ‘post-political environmental consensus’ whereby systemic disputes are foreclosed in favour of techno-managerial solutions. Such a vision seeks a clear-cut enemy that can offer a ready-made explanation (in this case organized crime) that circumvents the complexities of the issues at stake. Third, it is argued that the reputation of Naples as an exceptional city on the margins of Europe specifically shapes the ways in which notions of crisis, violence, politics, and garbage are perceived by the rest of the world. By combining these three factors – the nature of news production, the idea of post-politics, and the contingency of place – it is possible to deduce why international news on the garbage crisis was persistently inaccurate and why important lessons were overlooked. Developing upon postcolonial urban theory, the chapter ends by suggesting that a possible route out of this conundrum is to
insist on the need for Naples to be understood as an ‘ordinary city’ (Robinson 2006). Such a perspective, it is argued, can encourage a repoliticization of interpretations of the city’s waste crisis, while at the same time making us alert to the techniques through which Naples and its garbage continue to be framed on the global stage.
