Creating safety amidst chronic contamination: A mixed-method analysis of residents’ experiences in a Southern Italian steel town

Abstract

This study analyses how residents create safety in Taranto, Italy, a city located next to one of the largest steel plants in Europe. Combining long-term ethnographic research with an online-based survey, our study shows that most respondents recognise and criticise the presence of environmental risks in their daily lives but encounter such risks in complex ways. Contrary to previous scholarship suggesting that pollution can result in alienating residents from their lived environment, this research shows that acute awareness of environmental risks does not necessarily undermine attachment to place but rather can co-exist with or even strengthen it. Our findings propose first that residents experience and understand environmental risk mostly through air pollution, but often situate risks outside of their own neighbourhood and inscribe different meanings to such risk. Second, residents mitigate environmental risk through practices aimed at creating safety, such as moving away from the industrial area or using everyday practices and reflecting on their responsibility for actions. Third, we argue that residents create safety through an attachment and entitlement to place and emotional detachment from pollution and institutional failures. Finally, in line with residents’ concerns about safety and how to secure it, this study embraces a shift in its analytical focus from risk to the quest for safety. By doing so, it provides novel insights into environmental risk perception in industrially polluted areas and reveals the often-contradictory sentiments and practices that such areas invoke in residents.