From conflicting justifications to placebased resistance. The struggles against theexpansion of the Malpensa airport (1970- 2012)

Through an analysis of the 40-year history of conflicts triggered by the repeated attempts to expand the Malpensa airport (Italy), this paper seeks to show the heuristic strength of using the concept of modes of valuation of the environment to discuss the transformations that the environmental critique has undergone in the European context since the 1970s. I argue that the trajectory of transformations – from conflicting justifications to place-based resistance – witnessed by the environmental critique in this specific case is in fact quite similar to the dynamics of many other conflicts over large infrastructural projects in Europe. In the first section I briefly introduce the pragmatic sociology inspired concept of modes of valuation. In the second section I provide an analysis of the struggles against the Malpensa airport expansions from 1970 to 2012, wherein I distinguish three phases that I discuss in terms of the transformations that can be observed from the perspective of the modes of valuation of the environment that actors mobilise to fight the airport’s growth. In the final section I discuss some hypotheses concerning the more general socio-political dynamics beyond the transformations of environmental critique