Between energy and data. How geopolitics and geo-economics change along an infrastructure

Abstract

Some “technical” territorial functions engraved in the space of Northern Italy - manufacturing territories, logistics platforms, ports, combustion and energy production plants, pipelines, and refineries - return a complex stratigraphy of networks and assemblages of actors writing and rewriting their own strategies at multiple scales. The case of the trans-border geography built over time through and around the TAL Pipeline and the Port of Trieste turns out to be of great interest. The case gives us an attempt (not simple, nor linear) at local rescaling of international, national and regional geo-economies and economic interests. The considerations made in the contribution lead to evincing profiles of complexity and materiality of the nexus between spaces and powers - institutional, economic of multiutilities and lobbies, in particular -, which studies confined to the municipal, provincial and regional scale, on the one hand, and extended to the national and European scale, on the other, cannot explain.