Presentation short abstract

This presentation explores the Piave controversy through its emerging conflicting spatiotemporal configurations, contrasting hydrocratic linear time with heterogeneous local temporalities in shaping hydraulic risk and future territorial imaginaries.

Presentation long abstract

This paper presents the results of my doctoral research on the recent environmental conflict surrounding the Piave River and the management of hydraulic risk through a proposed flood detention basin in the protected Grave di Ciano area. The aim is to explore the chronotope of the Piave by analysing the spatiotemporal configurations that structure the controversy. In a context marked by decades of environmental exploitation and bureaucratic inertia since the 1966 flood, the basin project has produced an unusual alliance between hydraulic governance and extractive interests, opposed mainly by small local actors with limited institutional voice. The chronotopic framework highlights how temporal forms are inseparable from their spatial co-extension, generating situated configurations that shape socio-material assemblages. This allows a direct comparison between two conflicting temporalities. On one side stands the hydrocratic temporality, which constructs a linear, homogenized time aligned with economic development and technocratic control, rendering the basin both necessary and inevitable. On the other side emerges a contesting temporality, rooted in local lived experience, ecological and geological knowledge, artistic-philosophical perspectives, and alternative river-renaturalization techniques, which foreground the river’s heterogeneous temporalities and complex ecologies. The paper reconstructs how these competing temporal orders manipulate and reorganize human–nonhuman associations and how power relations unfold through the production of knowledge and ignorance as chronotopic zones regulating access to territorial understanding. The resulting assemblage of convergent alternative temporalities redefines hydraulic risk beyond technocratic modernism, challenging linear development narratives and opening plural horizons for imagining the future of the Piave.