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Networked infrastructures and the

‘local': Flows and connectivity in a
postsocialist city
Liviu Chelcea & Gergő Pulay
Published online: 01 Apr 2015.

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To cite this article: Liviu Chelcea & Gergő Pulay (2015) Networked infrastructures and the ‘local':
Flows and connectivity in a postsocialist city, City: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy,
action, 19:2-3, 344-355, DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2015.1019231

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 CITY, 2015
VOL. 19, NOS. 2–3, 344 –355, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2015.1019231

Networked infrastructures and

the ‘local’
Flows and connectivity in a postsocialist city

Liviu Chelcea and Gergó´ Pulay

Through an analysis of ethnographic data gathered from two communities using Bucharest’s
urban infrastructures, we argue that studies that privilege the large-scale analyses may be
enriched by paying closer attention to small-scale, non-structural factors that create local
citizenship claims and local forms of belonging to the city. The template of neoliberal trans-
formations of urban networks acquires unexpected forms at the infra-city scale, which may
Downloaded by [] at 10:47 03 April 2015

be fruitfully approached ethnographically. We begin with a historical overview of net-

worked infrastructures during socialism and postsocialism in Bucharest. We then describe
and contrast two of the many forms of belonging and exclusion from the city—grounded
in infrastructural connections and disconnections—that we call ‘maintenance and repair citi-
zenship’ and ‘incomplete citizenship’.

Key words: infrastructures, postsocialism, ethnography, citizenship, housing, repair, mainten-

ance, ghetto

Introduction: large-scale and small-scale Wachsmuth 2014). They downplay,

analyses of infrastructures however, the ‘imponderabilia of actual life’
(Malinowski [1922] 1984, 18), paying less

S
tudies of infrastructures usually rooted
in the fields of geography, political
ecology and urban planning have
proved extremely valuable in producing
multi-scalar analyses of modern houses and
cities (Graham and Marvin 2001; Kaika
2004, 2005). Materialized in colossal urban
infrastructures, the flows of geological sub-
stances through cities unite actors and
regions across scales. Such studies privilege
large-scale systems and spaces of flow in
order to highlight the blurred boundaries of
the city and nature, the sociotechnical
‘nature’ of cities, as well as the urbanization
of nature (Swyngedouw 1996; Angelo and
attention to the ordinary routines, political
subjectivities and citizenship claims of the
(communities of) infrastructure users them-
selves. We propose that studies of urban
infrastructures might gain additional strength
by being ‘anthropologized’.
As a growing anthropological literature has
shown, analyzing (urban) infrastructures eth-
nographically may produce new insights into
their dynamics (Dunn 2007; Von Schnitzler
2008; Dalakoglu 2010; Anand 2011; Mains
2012; Rodgers and O’Neill 2012; Larkin
2013; Trovalla and Trovalla 2015). Dimitris
Dalakoglu (2010, 133), for instance, suggests
that when approached through an

# 2015 Taylor & Francis

 CHELCEA AND PULAY: NETWORKED INFRASTRUCTURES AND THE ‘LOCAL’
ethnographic lens, highways gain localized
meanings, thus challenging ‘the prescribed
principles of global political economy of
motorways’. Similarly, studies of urbaniz-
ation rooted in geography and urban plan-
ning and examining the 19th century
onward have long documented the link
between networked connectivity and citizen-
ship, as infrastructures both connected and
disconnected people to and from cities and
states (see, e.g. Graham and Marvin 2001 on
the ‘infrastructural ideal’). Ethnographies of
infrastructures and citizenship, on the other
hand, pointed out the existence of local
forms of connection, disconnection and
belonging. Anand (2011), for instance, ana-
lyzed how municipal engineers manipulate
water pressure in Mumbai’s pipes in order
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to serve the slum dwellers at certain times
of the day. He describes this situation as
‘hydraulic citizenship’. Drawing upon a
similar analytic frame, Von Schnitzler (2008,
902) writes of ‘pre-paid citizenship’ in order
to describe transformations of citizenship
and body practices that are prompted by the
introduction of prepaid water meters in
Soweto. Such ethnographies illuminate how
people adapt to and alter urban networks in
their everyday practices, as well as the politi-
cal claims and technologies of power that
infrastructures encapsulate. They clarify the
limits and benefits of analyzing infrastruc-
tures from various scales, and highlight the
vital contributions that local infrastructure
users make to the operation of broader socio-
technical networks.
We illustrate the tension between the
‘bird’s eye’ view, large-scale analysis and eth-
nographic descriptions by using urban infra-
structures in Bucharest, a city of 1.8 million
inhabitants. Below we argue that the analysis
of infrastructures should commence at the
level of ‘local’ users, rather than being ana-
lyzed as a geographic totality that exceeds
the city. It is at this level that sociotechnical
systems gain meaning and ground citizenship
claims. In so doing, we look beyond the
dynamics of standard political economic
analysis, toward the important role that
345
highly localized and contingent factors play
in the way infrastructures are experienced,
normalized and politicized. We argue that
the infra-city level of a city infrastructure
generates multiple local citizenship claims,
rather than a single overall political narrative
of progress, involution or splintering
urbanism.
The paper begins with an overview of the
link between socialist/postsocialist citizen-
ship, urbanization and networked infrastruc-
tures in Bucharest during state socialism and
postsocialism. In this first part, we use a tota-
lizing narrative, often met in large-scale
analysis of infrastructures. As counterpoints,
we introduce ethnographic data from two
fieldwork sites that highlight the ways in
which these same networks generate different
local citizenship claims within the same city.
The first case illustrates the unexpected pol-
itical effects of material intervention on infra-
structures in the context of property rights
restitution for houses that were confiscated
by the socialist state in 1950 (Chelcea 2003).
The second case examines the neighborhood
of Ferentari, a ‘network ghetto’ (Graham
and Marvin 2001, 287) within Bucharest,
whose local forms of citizenship simul-
taneously combine exclusion and resistance
to the perception of community members as
‘victims’ (Pulay 2011). We analyze these
two situations, respectively, as cases of what
we call ‘maintenance and repair citizenship’
and ‘incomplete citizenship’. These ethno-
graphic cases illustrate how totalizing narra-
tives about networked infrastructures might
be called into question through ‘local’,
infra-city level analysis, thus rendering a
more textured description of political claims
and neoliberal hegemony after socialism.
Urban networks in Bucharest, socialist and
postsocialist
Compared to capitalist networked urbaniz-
ation, little has been written about urban
infrastructures in socialist and postsocialist
cities (see Humphrey 2003; Moss 2008;
 346 CITY VOL. 19, NOS. 2 – 3
Bouzarovski 2009; Collier 2011; Schwenkel
2013; Johnson 2014). Apart from some anec-
dotal evidence, it is difficult to make strong
statements about the relation between the
everyday life and the transformations of
urban infrastructures in Romania. As
Graham and Marvin (2001, 161) point out,
infrastructures in socialist cities had ‘reason-
able coverage but weak performance,
especially in maintenance’. During the last
three decades, the governance, capacity and
technical dimensions of infrastructures for
water, gas, heat or power in postsocialist
countries underwent significant transform-
ations. The status of utilities provisions
changed from being a basic citizenship right
during socialism, to a more market-based
vision that echoes processes of fragmentation,
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consumerism and social dumping (Graham
and Marvin 2001).
In Bucharest’s case, there is a good deal of
anecdotal information about the socialist-era
shortages of power and hot water, as well as
the low pressure of gas for heating and
cooking stoves. Although such networks
expanded substantially from the 1950s
through the 1990s, the socialist state privi-
leged heavy industry over domestic con-
sumption. The privileging of industry over
domestic usage led to shortages for which
the state was blamed for failing to deliver
what was promised in the generous official
socialist ideology (Verdery 1996). Frequently
in the late 1980s, and sometimes daily, energy
providers successively cut power to entire
districts holding between 300,000 and
400,000 inhabitants. One joke that circulated
widely in Romania at this time went some-
thing like the following: ‘What is the largest
disco in the whole world? Bucharest!’ These
planned outages led to intense feelings of
comunitas, as ‘moments in and out of time’
(Turner 1969, 60), and formed major sites of
political discontent. Similarly, ‘hot’ water
was only provided intermittently and its
temperature lay somewhere between cold
and hot. During the summers, especially in
the warmest period between late July and
early August, hot water was cut altogether
for maintenance and repair activities that
lasted three weeks.
During the socialist period, especially in
the winter and around Christmas, many
households had no choice but to cook at
night when gas pressure was higher due to
the nightly inactivity of industrial plants.
Household natural gas consumption was
further complicated by the fact that many
households used gas during the winter in
order to make up for the low temperature
of domestic radiators that were centrally con-
trolled by municipal heating plants. The low
temperature of these heaters impacted the
use of social geography of dwellings, as
people congregated in kitchens where gas
was available to generate heat and domestic
comfort.
Despite such shortcomings, the networked
infrastructures expanded substantially
together with the expansion of the city
during socialism. The 19th-century ‘modern
infrastructural ideal’ (Graham and Marvin
2001) was employed in socialist planning
through the early 1990s, with notable
achievements. As the population of Bucharest
doubled from 1 to 2 million people between
the 1940s and 1990s, infrastructure for gas
and hot water was almost built from
scratch. For example, in the central districts
of the city, where the best housing could be
found throughout the socialist period, the
percentage of dwellings with gas pipes
increased from 5 to 61% between 1948 and
1991, replacing wood-based heating. Simi-
larly, networks for water and power gradu-
ally extended from the central districts to
more remote neighborhoods on the outskirts
of the city, as the socialist state attempted to
fulfill its commitment to more even spatial
development.
As Bouzarovski (2009, 457) explains, the
governance of the networks was monopolis-
tic and both ‘vertically and horizontally inte-
grated’. During socialism,
‘a single company would be responsible for
the generation, transmission and distribution
of any one given type of energy (electricity,
 CHELCEA AND PULAY: NETWORKED INFRASTRUCTURES AND THE ‘LOCAL’
gas, oil) throughout any given country.
Moreover, utilities were kept under strict
control of the state, while it was made certain
that their investment policies were aligned
with broader industrial development
objectives.’ (Bouzarovski 2009, 457)
Utilities were de-commodified and offered as
social services that were taken to be a matter
of citizenship rights. Perceiving ‘the right to
energy [as a . . . ] universal entitlement,
rather than a service to be paid for’, utilities
provisions were subsidized in a variety of
ways, in outright prices for households and
relative to large industrial consumers (Bou-
zarovski 2009, 457).
The networks for hot water and domestic
heating were highly centralized. In Bucharest
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in the 1990s, for instance, pipes for domestic
heating and hot water were provided by
eight heating plants situated in the western,
northern, southern and eastern extremities of
the city. They linked districts that were com-
prised of high-rise, collective, prefabricated
concrete slab buildings, which were con-
structed between the 1960s and 1980s and
totaled nearly 80% of the city’s entire building
stock. Regarded in retrospect, these net-
worked connections were viewed as being
‘rigid’ and ‘overly centralized’ in comparison
to the ‘flexibility’ provided by heating
meters and domestic energy technologies
that were introduced later (Poputoaia and
Bouzarovski 2010, 3820). Sometimes above
ground, sometimes beneath ground, these
centralized networks were and still are a
visible presence in Bucharest. In winter, they
generated the ‘proverbial lines of melted
snow in post-communist cities—correspond-
ing to the routes of the underground hot
water pipes beneath them’ (Poputoaia and
Bouzarovski 2010, 3821), as well as a refuge
for those postsocialist urban outcasts who
sought heat, both humans (chronically and
occasionally homeless people—see O’Neill
2014) and animals (stray dogs and cats) alike.
While such shortcomings were common,
they had a leveling effect and created, to para-
phrase Clifford Geertz (1956), an ideology of
347
‘shared infrastructural poverty’.1 Shortages in
the provision of utilities created significant
equality of poverty, leveling income inequal-
ities and creating an abstract infrastructural
‘us’ vs. ‘them’, a common political folk taxon-
omy during socialism. The poor functioning
of different infrastructures affected all social-
ist-era inhabitants, independently of class,
income and political power. It did not
matter if one was rich or poor, if the centra-
lized heating system delivered heat below
the comfort level or the power distribution
network cut off entire neighborhoods.
Paradoxically, the early 1990s brought
about a continuation and restatement of the
19th- and 20th-century modern infrastruc-
tural ideal. Because malfunctioning infra-
structures were such a widespread political
concern during socialism, one of the most
immediate priorities for the new, ‘revolution-
ary’ regime in 1990 was improvement of uti-
lities provisioning. During the first few years
after the regime change, the high quality in
the provisioning of utilities was taken as a
symbol of the historical rupture with the
‘communist’ past, and as a ritual of ‘purifi-
cation from socialism’ (Eyal 2000). Greater
attention was given to providing adequate
temperature for hot water, gas pressure and
continuous power. Gas pipes continued to
extend into old housing stock, both in the
center and peripheries, thanks to municipal
subsidies. Through a combination of recent
memory, geopolitical energy politics and the
inertia of utilities provision architecture,
state attention to providing domestic
comfort was very high up through the mid-
1990s. Although subsidies diminished into
the 2000s, some municipalities continue to
subsidize the provisioning of central heating
and hot water. To this day, the wealthy city
of Bucharest devotes a sizeable chunk of its
budget to cover half of the production costs
for the city’s hot water and heating.
During the late 1990s and early 2000s,
Bucharest’s infrastructures underwent a
variety of splintering processes through the
combination of increasing privatization,
new European Union regulations, changing
 348 CITY VOL. 19, NOS. 2 – 3
geopolitical energy politics and revanchist
class politics (Graham and Marvin 2001).
Whereas pre-socialist and socialist urbaniz-
ation linked networked urbanization to citi-
zenship, the neoliberal reforms of the last
two decades privileged the ‘consumer’ and
the financially rich households. These pol-
icies began emphasizing the financial respon-
sibility and accountability of users,
unbundling service provisions and discon-
necting financially deprived households
from networked flows.
Access to utilities devolved from a basic
citizenship right to a consumer good. Utili-
ties became ‘spaces of calculability’ as house-
holds were increasingly monitored and held
responsible for the quantities of water, heat
and electricity they consumed (Callon 1998;
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Von Schnitzler 2008). Long gone were the
days when state utility companies ‘did not
meter the individual consumption of gas, dis-
trict heating, and in some cases even electri-
city’ (Bouzarovski 2009, 457). From the
mid-2000s onward, meters for water and
heating became standard domestic equip-
ment. As of 2004, a few years after they
became compulsory, meters were installed
in about 55% of those apartment buildings
that were connected to district heating
(Poputoaia and Bouzarovski 2010, 3822).
For heating provision, universal entitlement
was replaced with targeted, ‘means-tested’
financial support for the energy-poor house-
holds (Bouzarovski 2009, 457; see also Bou-
zarovski, Petrova, and Sarlamanov 2012).
In the early 2000s, utilities were further
fragmented as heating and hot water shifted
from being centralized toward being provi-
sioned through domestic gas-based equip-
ment. This occurred at a historical juncture
when gas was cheap. Between 1990 and 2004,
in the approximately 250 settlements which
had centralized district heating, about one-
fifth of all households were disconnected. In
some areas, no less than 90% of households
were disconnected (Poputoaia and Bouzar-
ovski 2010, 3822). Some houses sought
increased autonomy, while others, experien-
cing downward mobility, were decoupled
from utilities by the joint action of public
administrators and owners’ associations that
formed in the high-rise apartment buildings
where they resided. If impoverished houses
were only deprived of hot water, but not of
heating (as disconnection from heating was
technically more difficult), some households
extracted warm water from the heating pipes
that circulated through the apartment’s cast
iron radiators, which could be used for
bathing and washing. In response, district
heating plants added oil to the heating water,
which rendered it dirty and thus unusable
for such cleaning purposes.
Municipal pipes and lines for gas, water and
power were privatized and turned over to
French and Italian companies in the early
2000s. The availability of street life infrastruc-
tures, such as water fountains and public
toilets, decreased or became accessible on a
pay-per-use basis. Underclass households
living in or near the center of Bucharest, for
whom the comforts of the modern home are
limited to power, are unable to pay for
running water. Such households present a
daily spectacle of urban poverty as they push
supermarket shopping carts, filled with 5-
and 10-liter plastic bottles, between their
homes and the few remaining water fountains.
We outlined above some empirical
materials that are intelligible as a narrative
describing the transition from a situation of
de-commodified utilities provision and
shared infrastructural poverty to one of splin-
tering urbanism and growing infrastructural
inequality. The scale of analysis was at the
level of the city. In the following section we
will complicate this story by examining two
cases that highlight the simultaneous role of
the unexpected and of past histories that
shape contemporary urban inequalities.
Maintenance and repair citizenship:
tenants of nationalized housing in
Bucharest’s central areas
The first case emphasizes the centrality of
maintenance and repair in the dynamics of
 CHELCEA AND PULAY: NETWORKED INFRASTRUCTURES AND THE ‘LOCAL’
citizenship claims related to postsocialist
infrastructure. It is centered on a particular
group of Bucharest inhabitants, namely,
tenants living in state-owned housing. His-
torically, this category of tenant consisted of
two types: those who inhabited buildings
constructed by the socialist state—usually
high-rise apartment buildings—between
1950 and 1989, and those who lived in
houses that were built prior to 1950 but that
had been confiscated by the state. As a rule,
this latter subgroup populated old buildings
that were constructed between the end of
the 19th century and the first decades of the
20th century. This first case focuses on this
subgroup of tenants. Complications with
the restitution of nationalized houses in
Romania came to the fore during the mid-
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1990s and produced bitter political, interfa-
milial and legal conflicts.
Immediately following the end of social-
ism there were about 120,000 such tenants
in Bucharest. Together they occupied about
5% of the city’s housing stock. Up until
the mid-1960s, Bucharest’s stock of nationa-
lized apartments and houses remained a key
source of housing. Between the late 1940s
and the mid-1960s, a mere 80,000 new apart-
ments were constructed in contrast with the
450,000 that were built in the following two
decades. In 1990, following a general Euro-
pean trend (Ronald 2008), the Romanian
postsocialist state privatized all state
housing, granting ownership to sitting
tenants at give-away prices that were calcu-
lated on socialist real-estate logic rather
than market logic. Overall, in the postsocia-
list era, Romania became a republic of
homeowners, with more than 95% of the
country’s housing stock being privately
owned. Yet, if someone claimed that they
or their ancestors had owned a house prior
to its being nationalized, the government
suspended the sale to that building’s
tenants. Such changes made ownership a
much more salient political and cultural cat-
egory after the fall of socialism.
At the time of nationalization, most natio-
nalized housing had running water and
349
electricity, but no pipes for gas. Because
they were old, they needed constant repairs.
Early official reports indicated that the
state’s newly acquired housing stock was
already aging in the 1950s. As tenants’ occu-
pancy rights were extremely strong, and as
the state funding for housing after the 1960s
was predominantly allocated to the construc-
tion of large housing estates, the burden for
the upkeep of nationalized buildings was
placed upon the new tenants themselves.
That meant that they were financially respon-
sible for everyday repairs (Graham and Thrift
2007), as well as for any improvements in
access to municipal infrastructures. These
latter improvements were various in nature,
and their implementation might be carried
out by the tenants themselves or specialized
workers whom they hired. The extension of
gas pipes to such houses, facilitated by the
construction of the large housing estates in
Bucharest, was one common improvement.
Another common improvement was related
to the changing social geographies of these
houses. As the first tenants who moved in
between the 1950s and 1960s eventually
moved to new socialist housing estates, the
remaining tenants could expand into the
newly vacated spaces. Such expansions led
to the creation (and suppression) of kitchens,
bathrooms in attics and the re-compartmen-
talization of existing spaces. These renova-
tions were carried out at the expense of
tenants.
Because the state was relatively absent in
such material engagements, and because
such tenants had indefinite leases—being
able, for instance, to bequeath their tenancy
in the building to their offspring—the occu-
pancy of ‘their’ houses became a core com-
ponent of their citizenship (Turner,
Hegedüs, and Tosics 1992). Since the mid-
1990s, a wave of restitution claims put forth
by the pre-socialist owners of these structures
unbundled the tenants’ living arrangements.
Perceived as a rupture with the socialist
past, and as a search for historical justice,
these tenure changes sometimes privileged
the tenants, sometimes the former owners.
 350 CITY VOL. 19, NOS. 2 – 3
Overall, it generated the displacement of
many tenant families.
Under these circumstances, tenants’ own-
ership claims came to be expressed in the
language of their material engagements with
the capillary endings of urban infrastructural
networks to which they contributed. They
counter the state’s withdrawal from their
legal situation through countless stories
about the improvements they made to their
buildings. Why, the tenants often asked, did
the postsocialist state not grant them full
property rights if they had proven to be
good socialist citizens? As evidence, tenants
cite their upkeep and improvements in the
flow of water, gas and electricity in their
homes. This argument has been rehearsed
even more intensely, since after the late
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1970s, municipal funds allocated to the main-
tenance of nationalized housing were sub-
stantially decreased.
When tenants express their citizenship
claims, whether in everyday discussions or
through organized politics, they reference
improvements, plumbing and housing
repairs, but also the socialist-era social
order, postsocialist housing inequalities and
notions of a general public good. As persons
whose rights should be recognized, their dis-
course takes on a distinctly proprietarian
understanding of property (Rose 1994, chap.
3; Blomley 2005; see also Verdery and Hum-
phrey 2004). Unlike the capitalist view of
property as wealth-enhancing, their view is
centered on ‘ideas of an earlier time in
which property was thought to be a means
to foster and recognize “propriety”, in the
sense of a “proper” ordering of social and
political life’ (Rose 1994, 47). Proprietarian
understandings of property are linked to
ideas of authority, good order and rule; it ‘is
that which is needed to keep good order in
the commonwealth or body politic’ (Rose
1994, 58).
Tenants equate integrity of the person with
the proper fulfillment of socialist citizenship,
as well as with the care of ‘their’ houses.
Echoing Lockean notions of improvement,
they reference repair, plumbing and
improvement of their houses. Whereas fol-
lowing state rollbacks in other parts of the
world, ‘nonstate actors like development
and humanitarian organizations shape gov-
ernance [ . . . ] changing the calculus of
belonging, recognition, and making claims’
(Carse 2014, 397), for such tenants there is
little ‘proxy citizenship’ and ‘hybrid state’.
Instead, they glorify their bundle of socialist
citizenship rights through support of political
parties that forward their claims. Tenants
describe (and lament) the unbundling of
their former rights to their houses as instances
of moral abandonment by the state and as
immorality. Here one may note that the tota-
lizing narrative about splintering urbanism
fails to describe the tenants’ situation.
Instead of a master narrative of neoliberal
transformation, socialist- and pre-socialist-
era path-dependent dynamics came to the
fore.
Incomplete citizenship: Ferentari as a
network ghetto
Marginalized social categories have been his-
torically associated with the southern periph-
eries of Bucharest, especially with District 5,
where our second field site was located.
This is where the infamous neighborhood of
Ferentari, our second ethnographic location
and case study, is situated. The mass media
depicts Ferentari as the city’s ultimate
‘problem zone’, generally associated with
Gypsy inhabitants, even though its actual
population is highly mixed between Roma
and non-Roma Romanians. During the post-
socialist transition, Ferentari became a neigh-
borhood with the highest concentrations of
unskilled and (officially) unemployed
laborers in the city. Today, a significant part
of the neighborhood’s built environment
still resembles a village, generally dominated
by substandard rural-type housing, substan-
dard infrastructure and ‘above standard’
neighborly relations. In the period of socialist
industrialization, apartment buildings of
poor-quality flats and workers’ dormitories
 CHELCEA AND PULAY: NETWORKED INFRASTRUCTURES AND THE ‘LOCAL’
were erected in Ferentari in response to
housing shortages and the influx of migration
from outside the city. The more impover-
ished among these buildings—those with
studio apartments that were once built for
single workers under socialism who came to
Bucharest (nefamilişti)—are sometimes also
referred to as ‘ghettos’ or as ‘our Bronx’
(Bronxul nostru), especially among younger
inhabitants and men who hang out in the
streets. Another common way of identifying
these buildings is to refer to the ‘junkies’
(drogaţi) who are known to concentrate in
these miserable houses.
The domain of infrastructure in this poor
Bucharest neighborhood offers a means for
grasping local mechanisms of territorial stig-
matization through which collective dis-
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honor and attributions of worthlessness are
imposed from the centers of political, econ-
omic and cultural power on negatively distin-
guished social and spatial categories
(Wacquant 2008). Among the mechanisms
that render the neighborhood to a low pos-
ition within the city’s spatial hierarchy are,
for instance, the large numbers of stray dogs
living there (as opposed to more central
parts of town where these were made nearly
invisible due to extermination campaigns) or
the groups of rambling, homeless drug
addicts. These latter became more visible in
Ferentari than elsewhere after public shops
selling legal intoxicants (etnobotanice) were
closed by the authorities in many other
zones of the city, long before there was any
similar intervention in Ferentari. In other
words, territorial stigmatization was in this
case a symbolic continuation of the material
processes whereby state authorities create
‘social waste dumps’: territories where gov-
ernance is woefully absent, in which structu-
rally accumulated urban ills must be largely
dealt with by the inhabitants themselves,
who are simultaneously (and incorrectly)
viewed as responsible for creating these very
same hardships. It hardly comes as a surprise
that when state-led infrastructural develop-
ments were finally introduced to several
underserved areas in the early 2000s—a few
351
paved streets or new sewer lines—inhabitants
tended to account for these investments as
mere vote-seeking by local politicians,
especially as new construction was always
undertaken during electoral campaigns.
The relationship between infrastructure
and territorial stigmatization was played out
in public during a protest (that some com-
mentators disparagingly labeled a ‘riot’) that
broke out in Ferentari in the autumn of
2006. The local electricity supplier had
decided to disconnect some apartment
blocks due to energy theft and accumulated,
unpaid electric bills. Only a few residents
had documents to prove that they owned or
were leasing their flats, while others were
squatting with no property rights whatso-
ever. During the protest, inhabitants burned
tires, blocked traffic and broke the window
of a fire truck, all to demand the reconnection
of the electric supply. These events were
widely broadcast in Romanian media and
sparked wide debate.
The images and arguments that circulated
in these discussions evidenced disciplinary
mechanisms of blame and moral regulation
that further stigmatized neighborhood resi-
dents—whom we refer to as ‘incomplete citi-
zens’—on the mere basis of territorial
belonging. Some media commentators
feared that this revolt would provide a
‘dangerous precedent’ for subsequent pro-
tests in other poor areas of Romanian cities.
To challenge the legitimacy of the protestors’
demands, some commentators even ques-
tioned how poor the residents of Ferentari
actually were, citing ‘satellite dishes,
double-glazed windows, color TVs and air-
conditioning’. Such comments also insisted
on a contrast between the rioters of Ferentari
and other poor—but ‘decent’—Romanians
who ‘do not burn tires’, but rather accepted
that they must ‘tighten their belts’ and pay
their bills. In such discourses, rioting inhabi-
tants not only stood for the ‘irresponsible
mentality’ of the poor, but they also rep-
resented flaws of any and all citizens who
burdened the state with unreasonable and
insatiable expectations. In the end, the
 352 CITY VOL. 19, NOS. 2 – 3
solution to the riots came from one of the
richest businessmen and politicians in
Romania, Gigi Becali, who donated roughly
400,000 euros of his own money to pay the
inhabitants’ debts.
In the winter of 2010, the electricity supply
was once again cut in a few streets of Feren-
tari, but this time owing to a broken transfor-
mer. After about a week of waiting for the
transformer to be fixed, a group of inhabi-
tants spontaneously took to the streets to
demonstrate. They blocked traffic on the
neighborhood’s main street and chanted.
These protesters explained that, ‘If we don’t
go out to the street, they won’t provide us
with electricity, there’s no chance otherwise.’
Their reliance on the strategic power of the
streets was no coincidence, as the neighbor-
Downloaded by [] at 10:47 03 April 2015
hood is transected by one of the eight main
roads that radiate outward from Bucharest’s
center. This time there were no violent
clashes between police and inhabitants, and
the media remained indifferent. After a few
hours the mayor himself rushed to the dem-
onstration to calm the crowd and avoid
further escalation.
Unlike the 2006 protests, the story of this
demonstration and the transformer malfunc-
tion that caused it never reached the broader
Romanian public beyond the neighborhood.
This difference between the media coverage
of the two protests could also be owed
(among other things) to the kinds of material
and moral inferences that can be differently
drawn from the nature of each ‘malfunc-
tion’—in one case, contestation over social
relations of debt and exchange; in the other,
an initially broken transformer that (in
itself, as a transformer) is socially indifferent
to the electric company, the residents alike
and citizenship. Unlike social indifference to
repaying a (utility) debt—which can be
recast in moral terms—the transformer’s
indifference cannot and it was rendered as a
technical, apolitical issue.2
Again, as in the case of tenants, non-struc-
tural, contingent factors—such as the specific
moral properties of the transformer, includ-
ing specific properties that it lacks—are
central to the contestation over infrastruc-
tural connectivity and citizenship claims.
The structural violence leveled historically
against the residents of Ferentari created a
space of solidarity and symbolic opposition
to more affluent parts of the city. Several
national and international non-governmental
organizations (NGOs) established programs
in the neighborhood since the 1990s, trying
to address poverty. Their presence in the
neighborhood and their overall inability to
solve poverty forms generates ‘proxy citizen-
ship’ (Carse 2014, 397), based on ideologies
of victimhood. Such inefficient programs
made residents highly suspicious of project-
ing the image of victims to outsiders. Local
pride and neighborhood citizenship prevent
residents from placing stronger and regular
pressure on municipal administrators, which
is limited to rare and sporadic outbursts.
Conclusions
In this paper, we argued that although cities
are indeed networked spaces, and urban
infrastructures are large scale, stable and inte-
grate various scales, the multiple forms of
local citizenship often remain understudied.
Studies that privilege the large scale tend to
flatten out the variety of infrastructure
users, underplaying important contingencies,
localized histories, meanings and citizenship
claims that emerge throughout various net-
worked locations. Infrastructures generate
‘communities of practice’ and encourage the
creation and usage of standards (Star 1999,
2002), but one must also recognize that the
meaning of such practices are highly localized
and contingent, and shared across entire net-
works of infrastructures. Well-known pro-
blems related to fragmented and unequal
access to infrastructure cannot thus be
reduced to a continuum between ‘haves’ and
‘have-nots’. In Bucharest, fragmentation was
experienced through different histories,
memories of inclusion and political claims.
As an analogy to our argument, one may
think of the postmodernist critique of
 CHELCEA AND PULAY: NETWORKED INFRASTRUCTURES AND THE ‘LOCAL’
political economy in anthropology, which
suggested that ethnography should not pre-
suppose the existence of totality, but rather
trace evidence for connections between and
within sites (Marcus 1995). If one replaces
the totality of ‘colonialism’ or ‘capitalism’
with that of ‘infrastructure’, one ought to
reconstruct the scale of infrastructure from
the ‘native’s [or user’s] point of view’. This
is what George Marcus (2005) seems to
suggest when he writes that:
‘in keeping ethnography accountable to
subject perspectives, a distributed knowledge
system is not mappable outside the derivation
of it from subject points of view. Keeping
ethnography ethnographic in the
Malinowskian sense means not falling for the
Downloaded by [] at 10:47 03 April 2015
temptation to allow given networks or
technical systems to be the objective space of
ethnography.’ (18)
In the cases outlined here, as matter flowed
through the tenants’ pipes, it helped create
various assemblages between ‘their’ respect-
ive houses, the street-level sewers, laborers
such as professional plumbers or neighbors
who were both willing and able to repair
pipes and houses and the Romanian state,
which delivered water, power or gas. The cir-
culation of matter throughout Bucharest’s
infrastructures helped produce ownership
claims for tenants, whereas for others, who
were connected to the same urban infrastruc-
tures, such circulation produced wholly pol-
itical effects or none at all.
Ferentari residents’ political mobilizations
around urban infrastructures, as well as their
rejection of a putative victim status, help us
to understand how political and citizenship
claims are formed. Such claims draw
together the contingencies of local histories,
infra-city scale dynamics, as well as both
state and informal attempts to rebuild
urban infrastructure. As Ashley Carse
(2014, 397) points out, ‘even as the terms
of citizenship are redefined under new econ-
omic and political conditions, emerging
forms of governance are always entangled
with the legacies of the past’. In this
353
particular case, the path-dependent
dynamics of infrastructure, historical incor-
poration into infrastructure networks, as
well as images of the state and socialist citi-
zenship all play an important part.
The neoliberal template used in governing
the urban infrastructures of Bucharest after
1990 witnessed multiple citizenship rollbacks,
which can only be understood ethnographi-
cally. Whatever ‘infrastructures’ are, they
should not be taken to be a given external
reality, the nature and effects of which could
be decided upon only from historically specific,
grounded investigation. Here we presented just
two forms of local citizenship claims inside
Bucharest, but there may be many more. For
instance, for residents who could barely
afford to pay the rising bills, the circulation of
fluids through the Bucharest infrastructure
produced accusations of theft by utilities com-
panies. An a priori sense of the network’s total-
ity does not, by itself, reveal meaning. In that
sense, the ethnographic study of infrastructure
functions as an arbitrary location (Candea
2007). The ‘objective’ space of infrastructures
is populated by local citizenship claims that pri-
vilege different technical, political, historical
and economic configurations.
Acknowledgments
We thank Hillary Angelo, Jonathan Devore,
Fritz-Julius Grafe, Ulrika Trovalla and Erik
Trovalla for reading and offering improve-
ment suggestions. Special thanks to Christine
Hentchel for her help and suggestions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the
authors.
Notes
1 Geertz (1956, 141) uses ‘shared poverty’, in the
context of the 19th- and early 20th-century
 354 CITY VOL. 19, NOS. 2 – 3
Indonesian peasant economy, in order to describe
peasants’ commitment to communal arrangements
which tend ‘to share food equally when he has it and
share its absence equally when he doesn’t have it’.
2 We thank Jonathan Devore for this suggestion and
insight.
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Liviu Chelcea is a professor in the Depart-
ment of Sociology, University of Bucharest.
Email: liviu.chelcea@sas.unibuc.ro
Gergó´ Pulay is a doctoral student in the
Department of Sociology and Anthropology,
Central European University. Email:
pulaygergo@gmail.com