The “nocturnal body” of the infrastructure: Geographical reflections on coloniality and differential mobility in the Trieste borderscape.

Journal title RIVISTA GEOGRAFICA ITALIANA
Author/s Francesco Marchi, Claudio Minca
Publishing Year 2026 Issue 2026/2
Language Italian Pages 23 P. 5-27 File size 0 KB
DOI 10.3280/rgioa2-2026oa23040
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This article reflects on the relationship between infrastructure and different mobility regimes in contemporary Europe, focusing particularly on Trieste’s borderscape. Although several studies in the last decade have adopted an infrastructural approach to analyse different mobility regimes, the relationships between them remains to be fully explored. Taking into account the colonial origin of the infrastructural logic, this article introduces the concept of the “nocturnal body” of the infrastructure, illustrating how such logic has always implied the imposition of differential forms of mobility. While infrastructures ensure safe and fast mobility for certain social groups in specific spaces, at the same time other groups are forced to move through its nocturnal body. This “body” represents a social and political space characterised by violence and high risk, but also the material precondition for the very
existence of the safer, more visible workings of the infrastructure.

Keywords: coloniality, infrastructure, differential mobilities, the nocturnal body of the infrastructure.

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Francesco Marchi, Claudio Minca, Il “corpo notturno” dell’infrastruttura. Riflessioni geografiche su colonialità e differenziale di mobilità nel borderscape di Trieste in "RIVISTA GEOGRAFICA ITALIANA" 2/2026, pp 5-27, DOI: 10.3280/rgioa2-2026oa23040