How to put environmental injustice on the planner's radical agenda. Learning from the land of fires -Italy

Known from ancient Rome as Campania Felix due to the fertility of its lands, the urban region between the Provinces of Napoli and Caserta – southern Italy – has been lately stigmatized by national and international mass-media as Land of Fires. The phenomenon of fires is the tip of an iceberg that lies on illicit waste trade by the organized crime. Depicted as a biblical apocalypse due to the consequences on human health and local economy, the case of the Land of Fires is highlighting the incapability of authorities in charge to cope with the “new urban question” that environmental issues pose. If we look at the Land of Fires as an unbalanced ecosystem in the face of socio-ecological dynamics connected to the metabolism of waste, the insurgency of movements fighting for the compensation of the environmental damages sounds as a fair reaction to the lack of regulation. Among activism, “street science” and creative ways to defend the right to health, local movements are behaving as Environmental Justice Organizations by using the mix of struggles, ways of learning and discourse of dissent that are usually associated to the marginalized communities of the global sud. After analysing the kind of injustices local communities are living, the paper is going to explain why, looking at socio-ecological resilience of the Land of Fires in a radical planning perspective, could be a strategy to help the urban region to bounce back.