Blueish Plannings: Clashing Fluidities, Volumes, and Narratives in Palermo’s Waterfront

This chapter presents part of a research project (Charging, see acknowledgement) that began in 2023 (and is still ongoing), focusing on the so-called South Coast of Palermo, Sicily (a term that does not correspond to an administrative unit but has entered the common lexicon of inhabitants, urban planning, and media). Within the framework of critical ocean studies, this chapter thinks here through blueish geographies, with the aim to highlight within “the oceanic” the various spaces that exist as an excess and extension of the sea (see Albrecht & Palermo, 2027). It is precisely this more-than-wet materiality (Peters & Steinberg, 2019) that defines the stories and geographies of this coast, shaped by an accumulation of slow violence (Nixon, 2011) and the sedimentation of wastes (Armiero, 2021): the remnants of the criminal overbuilding and cementification of Palermo, which began in the 1960s through the collusion between the Mafia and the political institutions of that era.