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Paper short abstract

Taking inspiration from China Miéville’s The City & The City, in this paper I analyse how socio-economic and political polarisations structure perception, responsibility, and the everyday life in Taranto, a southern Italian city home to one of Europe’s largest and most polluting steel plants.

Paper long abstract

In The City & The City, China Miéville imagines two cities occupying the same physical space. Their streets overlap and their inhabitants pass each other daily, yet citizens are trained to “unsee” the other city, to actively not perceive what is materially present. This speculative device is about the governance of perception: how power organises what counts as reality. Drawing on Miéville, in this paper I analyse how socio-economic and political polarisations structure perception, responsibility and everyday life in Taranto, southern Italy, home to one of Europe’s largest and most polluting steel plants.

Known as the “city of two seas,” Taranto’s classical heritage and touristic imaginaries coexist with an industrial landscape marked by toxic emissions, contaminated soil, and elevated mortality. These are not separate zones but overlapping worlds layered onto the same air, streets, and bodies. I argue that this coexistence is sustained through politically engineered regimes of (un)seeing tied to the ex-ILVA plant. Framed by the state as economically indispensable, the plant is embedded in narratives of national productivity and employment. Legal exceptions, stalled remediation, risk calculations and technocratic expertise have often minimised environmental and health harms: unfortunate side effects of industrial modernity. However, this regime is continually contested: parents’ groups, environmental movements and civil society organisations “breach” official narratives through popular epidemiology, legal actions, protests and testimony, forcing toxicity into view. Between these positions, many residents inhabit a tense middle ground shaped by dependence on industrial work, where unseeing risk becomes an everyday practice of survival.