District Heating and Infrastructural Discontinuities in Bucharest, Romania

Tracing the dynamics of usage and supply of hot water and heating in Bucharest, the project studies the role of heat in the everyday life and the organization of post-Socialist urban spaces. The capital city of Romania hosts the largest district heating (DH) network in the European Union, built during the socialist regime to offer affordable and universally available energy to both residents of the city and industrial customers. The transition from socialism to market liberalism was accompanied by disinvestment in the centralized heating system which transformed the mechanisms of provision of public services as well as the relationship between the state and its citizens. While Termoenergetica, the municipal company that manages the operations of the district heating system, grapples with the challenge of administering an oversized supply of energy in the context of a rapidly declining demand, the provisioning of hot water and heating is anything but a seamless endeavor. The material anchors of the district heating infrastructure are subject to continuous decay, the tangible effects of which reverberate in locals’ everyday lives. As water pipes corrode and the power plants malfunction, individual consumers are forced to adapt their daily routines to the absence of heat for days, weeks, and even months on end.

Employing ethnographic methods that include archival research, participant observations and interviews with residents of the city as well as workers of Termoenergetica, this project inquires into the right to hot water in order to understand how its multiple presences and conditions configure urban governance. The material legacy of socialist regimes that enable the flow of hot water across the city is complemented with the cultural residue of normative conceptions about the state’s obligation to ensure continuous access to heat. In a political ecology no longer resumed to the state as a sole provider of welfare, the increasing role of private as well as supra-statal actors such as the European Union makes it challenging to actualize the expectations of what a “normal” life could look like. This renders Bucharest a particularly compelling research site, considering the fragmented coordination of actors that make the system endure, despite frequent interruptions and accidents on the pipeline.

This doctoral project makes a contribution to the anthropological study of heat by situating embodiment and everyday sociality within large scale processes of infrastructural adaptations to the social, demographic, political and economic change. Reaching beyond linear narratives of transition from socialist to neoliberalist world order, it speaks to potential configurations of energy futures in the region.