Plan for a canal from Chiavenna over the Splügen Pass by Pietro Caminada (1907), courtesy of Ing. Valerio Polazzo, Studio Polazzo, Rome
Presentation by Margareth Lanzinger
(Un)built roads and waterways in the Alps: economic interests and demanding materiality
at the International Conference „Beyond Infrastructure? (Un-)built Environments in the Anthropocene”, hosted by the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology in the course of the ERC AdG InfraNorth Building Arctic Futures
Sept. 22nd – 24th, 2025
The infrastructural development in the early modern Alps was primarily driven by economic and (trade-)political interests. In the eighteenth century, priority was initially given to the development of connections in the east of the Habsburg Monarchy around Vienna: in the 1720s, the Habsburg main trade roads (Hauptkommerzialstraßen) were built, including one directed from Vienna through Inner Austria to Trieste, which had become a Habsburg free port in 1719. Connections between economic regions in the west were of interest as well. From the late 1760s, the Swiss Planta and the Viennese government discussed a road linking Milan via Chiavenna through the Swiss Engadine with Tyrol, but it was never realised. Economic arguments were in favour, but the new route would have been in competition with existing routes and their operators, and other problems soon became apparent: roads would have had to be maintained, cleared and repaired. This would have involved and obliged the adjacent villages – and that apparently caused difficulties. During this period, both the history of the Alps and the debates on the Anthropocene assume a change in the understanding of nature in the wake of the eighteenth century-Enlightenment. The question is whether this was reflected by contemporaries in the context of such a road-building project. At the same time, authors in this field argue for a ‘new ontology’ to ‘reconfigure our orientation to the material world’ (Benson 2019). The paper attempts to draw these threads together, using the road project between Chiavenna and Innsbruck as a starting point, and to refer to some others.
