May 16th: The ZAD and the rise of struggles against transportation infrastructure projects (and their worlds)

Suggested reading:

"Against the Airport and Its World - Texts from an Intensification of Struggle in the Zone À Défendre" available here http://hophop.noblogs.org/post/against-the-airport-and-its-world/

"ZAD, Commune, Metropolis" available here  http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2013/04/509012.html

As with the NO TAV movement in Italy (an on-going struggle against the construction of a high-speed train line in the Susa Valley in Northern Italy), the ZAD is a struggle against a large-scale transportation infrastructural project intended to serve the interests of the urban elites who extract profit from such projects, as well as to facilitate the global circulation of capital.

Some themes we may want to consider in our discussion are: the hypothesis developed within the NO TAV movement "that power lies within the material infrastructure of the world itself, in the way that every local situation is configured, and not in political representation."* and therefore it makes sense to attack the construction site in the Susa valley. The way in which struggles such as the ZAD and NO TAV disrupt distinctions between urban and rural, centre and periphery.  For example, these infrastructural projects can be seen as an urbanization of rural space while the movements against them transform what are considered "peripheral" areas, into centres of struggle which give rise to new rebel cultures and insurrectionary practices which are then spread back to the metropolitan centres ("Bring the valley home!", "Block everything!" "Le ZAD est partout!"). And finally we can think about how the focus on attacking and blockading the sites of the circulation of capital (rather than of production and reproduction) "leads us to rethink what an actual strike could mean when the terrain is neither the factories, the sites of production, nor the political representation, but the whole metropolis (intended as a certain intensity of circulation, a certain rhythm, and all the ensuing modifications of subjectivities, which means nothing less than an anthropological revolution)"*.

*quotes from "Italy 2011-2012: from the No TAV struggle to the metropolitan strike."