Abstract

In this article, I examine the contentious dynamics surrounding the ontologies of the Padua-Venice waterway, focusing on the role of the legitimization of hydraulic expertise at the intersection of social mobilizations and institutional politics. A key sociological issue is the legibility of environmental conflicts in the context of institutional opacity, which obscures public understanding and relegates these issues to zones of non-knowledge. In this regard, I propose to expand Jack’s (2022) chronotopic expertise by considering ignorance as a part of the framework. The aim is to combine the ontological politics of water infrastructural transformation with the enactment of both scientific expertise and strategic ignorance while grounding them in a spatiotemporal configuration. Through an analysis of 20 years of local press coverage, I trace the evolution of the controversy, showing how the contested legitimacy of hydraulic expertise shifts over time, from being initially overlooked to becoming central to the debate. The controversy has been thus discussed through the relation between three hegemonic ontologies and relatives chronotopes: the waterway as a negative infrastructure and the absence chronotope; a multifunctional ontology and the metis chronotope; a flood diversion canal ontology and the hydrocratic chronotope.