Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities As The Spider-Web City

Octavia is described by Italo Calvino (1974) in his book Invisible Cities as the spider-web city; it is a city hanging over the void between two mountains. The infrastructure that holds the city together is made of ropes, chains, and catwalks. The mere existence of the city depends entirely on this infrastructure, a 'net which serves as passage and as support' (Calvino, 1974: 75). If, or actually when, this infrastructure fails, the city will collapse altogether. Calvino's imagined city of Octavia stands as an excellent allegory of contemporary cities in view of their dependence on critical infrastructure systems. Especially, though Octavia provides us with an entry point to consider urban infrastructures in relation to disorder. In this article, I consider disorder to be an important aspect of urban infrastructures. The notion of disorder has predominately

Specifically, the particularities of infrastructural disorder will be explored through a focused investigation of the country's largest waste infrastructure within the wider context of waste management controversies in Greece, as well as, the economic and political crisis which has been unfolding during the last few years. As it will be explained the various formal and informal processes and networks that emerge and develop around and through waste infrastructures are not periodic events but enduring frameworks of reference in relation to waste treatment in Athens. These processes, I argue, reflect an infrastructure condition which is open to change and contingency and is defined by instability, systemic and non-systemic disruption, and uncertainty. Infrastructures, such as waste landfills, then, I argue, are not closed controlled circuits, but rather unstable open systems that activate variegated and even contradictory dynamics with different objectives, rhythm and circulation