Post-Socialist Urban Infrastructures (OPEN ACCESS)

Tauri Tuvikene, Wladimir Sgibnev, Carola S. Neugebauer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351190336
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Post-Socialist Urban Infrastructures critically elaborates on often forgotten, but some of the most essential, aspects of contemporary urban life, namely infrastructures, and links them to a discussion of post-socialist transformation.

As the skeletons of cities, infrastructures capture the ways in which urban environments are assembled and urban lives unfold. Focusing on post-socialist cities, marked by neoliberalisation, polarisation and hybridity, this book offers new and enriching perspectives on urban infrastructures by centering on the often marginalised aspects of urban research - transport, green spaces, and water and heating provision.

Featuring cases from West and East alike, the book covers examples from Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Germany, Russia, Georgia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Tajikistan, and India. It provides original insights into the infrastructural back end of post-socialist cities for scholars, planners and activists interested in urban geography, cultural and social anthropology, and urban studies.

1Introduction

Linking post-socialist and urban infrastructures

Tauri TuvikeneWladimir Sgibnev andCarola S. Neugebauer

Infrastructural vignettes

As in many microrayons of the Soviet Union, a large-diameter pipe coming from the district heating plant, whose large exhaust chimney is visible from afar, meanders between the five-storey blocks of the ‘Sadriddin Ayni’ housing estate at the northern gates of Dushanbe, capital of Tajikistan. High-rise residential buildings form the mainstay of Soviet-era housing provision in Taijkistan and elsewhere in the former Soviet Union (FSU), as well as in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Today, they are still the backbone of the housing stock. Yet, in this housing estate, the district heating has not been working since the years of the civil war (1992–1997). Electricity is scarce and expensive, so residents have resorted to do-it-yourself solutions, installing their own wood-fired stoves with pipes peeking out of the windows. In wintertime, many families seal off all rooms but the living room and spend their days around the stove. This shift from a centralized infrastructural regime to an individualized and fragmented system has led to a definite loss of trust in the state, in Dushanbe as elsewhere in the formerly socialist bloc.

Several minibuses wait for passengers at the ‘Vodonasos’ terminal stop by the ‘Sadriddin Ayni’ housing estate. These minibuses, known as marshrutkas, were never thought of as means of mass transportation in Soviet urban planning, yet were particularly suited for the ‘wild 1990s’ in various parts of the post-socialist realm. New needs and possibilities, a new legal framework and new struggles for livelihood drastically transformed urban transport. Municipal operators were unable to meet the basic mobility needs of the population and an ever-growing fleet of marshrutkas filled the gap. At the same time, defunct industrial plants released thousands of people into unemployment, many of whom became absorbed by the marshrutka sector. The emergence of privately run transport options and the soaring increase in private car use signalled an individualization of mobility. Today, marshrutkas are banned on Dushanbe’s main thoroughfare: the administration considers them not to be presentable enough. Dushanbe, like many other cities, is looking for more modern and ‘world city’ alternatives, and aims to ban marshrutkas from its streets altogether.

Ambition and scope

The topic of these vignettes – collapse and deficiency, as well as ways of overcoming them – formed the primary common ground for infrastructure-related publications after the fall of communism. Indeed, the ‘continuing flow within the pipes […] literally and metaphorically [constitutes] the body politic’ (Alexander et al., 2007, p. 23). Consequently, the people affected may see the end of infrastructure provision as a sign of societal disintegration. Unsurprisingly, unstable utilities has become the most important single factor in a prevailing admiration of the Soviet forms of infrastructural governance, and also a source of numerous contentions. The academic interest of this present volume thus builds upon the societal salience of the topic.

Most publications on the topic, however, did not emerge from academia but from major international donors such as the World Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the Asian Development Bank, and their (Western) consultants involved in project implementation. In these publications, the transitological paradigm prevailed, addressing infrastructure development as a tool for fostering competitiveness and enabling access to markets (see also Kaminski, 2000; Shepherd and Wilson, 2006). For many cities and regions, this literature provides the sole source of statistics and analyses of infrastructures so far. Regarding public transport, several studies have delved into major cities of European Union (EU) accession countries such as Poland (Pucher, 1995), the Czech Republic (Pucher, 1999) and Hungary (Hook, 1999). For the FSU, country- and city-specific studies exist, among others, on Uzbekistan (Gwilliam et al., 1999), Kazakhstan (Finn, 2008; Gwilliam, 2000; Gwilliam, 2001) and Georgia (Finn, 2008), as well as some comparative overview papers (Kominek, 2005). Several authors have delved into the utilities sector – from digital infrastructures (Clarke, 2001) to water, electricity and heating, both with an urban focus (Kennedy, 1999; Lampietti and Meyer, 2002; World Bank, 2010) and dealing with regional water and energy conflicts, particularly in Central Asia (International Crisis Group, 2007; International Crisis Group, 2014) or ‘transition economies’ in general terms (Zhang, 2013). These publications are also a valuable source for understanding why urban infrastructures in our region of concern look as they do today – both in positive and negative terms. Yet the bulk of these publications are either based on policy reviews or on data provided by national statistical agencies. Their data quality is often doubtful and rarely detailed. Moreover, such studies are not interested in theoretical and conceptual debates, nor do they pay attention to the everyday experience of infrastructures.

This book, Post-Socialist Urban Infrastructures, takes a different path. Over the past decade, many scientists in geography, urban studies and planning, and more recently in anthropology, have made infrastructures a central part of their research – empirically but also conceptually. This ‘infrastructural turn’ (Graham, 2010) has investigated infrastructures as linking technologies and socio-material means with products of urban and societal change, which in turn shape the daily lives of individuals and societies. The ‘infrastructural turn’ has also drawn attention to ‘infrastructural lives’ – that is, the ways in which infrastructures are used and made usable in everyday practice (Graham and McFarlane, 2014). Infrastructures in this sense constitute a valuable conceptual lens for critical social research, particularly in urban contexts where infrastructures are dense and prominently visible, for example when they collapse in unstable institutional settings.

Infrastructure scholars have paid attention to the different ways in which infrastructures and their relations with cities have developed in the global North and South. The post-socialist context has remained largely excluded from the global North mainstream, but also from critical perspectives emanating from the global South (Tuvikene, 2016). The differences between materialities, practices, institutions and normative discourses should not be seen as definite: there are different accents brought forward through different assemblages of infrastructures. While the global North stresses the smooth operation and invisibility of infrastructures, the global South has highlighted the struggle for and lack of infrastructures, also highlighting colonial divides (Coutard and Rutherford, 2016). Departing from the global North and South, ‘post-socialism’ brings the hybridization of different infrastructural regimes to the fore. The legacies of socialist regimes are still present in aspects both material (such as housing stock, pipes and tramlines) and non-material (such as governing bodies and public discourses), now embedded in diversified paths of neoliberalism or paternalism. Thus, the adaptation of infrastructures to shrinking cities, downsized industries and shifted residential patterns has constituted a major post-socialist challenge, on top of challenges linked to the enormous concentration and growth of capital cities. This occurred simultaneously with different processes of democratization, as well as (new) exclusions, nation-building and dependencies, new modernization agendas and infrastructural setbacks. Post-socialism thus manifests a hybridity that constitutes an interesting field for critical reflection and mutual scholarly exchange between both the global North and global South, combining concerns from the infrastructural turn with emerging post-colonial theory-inspired comparative urbanism literature (e.g. Jacobs, 2012; Robinson, 2006, 2011; Tuvikene, 2016).

Henceforth, taking up the practical and theoretical value of infrastructural research, and the current ignorance of the interplay between infrastructure and post-socialist urban change, this volume positions post-socialism alongside the existing North and South literatures on infrastructure, drawing from previous studies and elaborating on how this literature informs what happens in contexts usually characterized as post-socialist, and how such contexts might help to reveal the production and consumption of infrastructures more generally, as well as to provide conceptual and practical insights. Therefore, the three terms in the book’s title constitute the starting points of discussion:

1)How do urban features shape infrastructures, and how do infrastructures constitute urbanity?

2)How may we grasp the interrelation between research on infrastructures and post-socialist urban change?

3)Which lessons should we draw from post-socialism about urban infrastructures, and how do infrastructures help to understand post-socialist urban change?

Conceptualizing urban infrastructures

Over the past decade or so, infrastructures have gained a central position for research in social sciences, no longer subsumed under other processes (Rao, 2014). Inspired by the idea of studying the unstudied (Star, 1999), a number of researchers have focused on infrastructures, leading to declarations of an ‘infrastructural turn’ (Graham, 2010). We can thus observe the emergence of ‘a new genre of thinking that narrates the social life of a city through its material infrastructure’ (Amin, 2014, p. 137). A change of perspective from assuming infrastructures to be in the background to shifting them to the fore of thinking about cities and societies is on the way (Amin and Thrift, 2017; Coutard and Rutherford, 2016; Guy et al., 2001, 2011). According to Latham and Wood (2015), there are at least three reasons for such a rise in interest in infrastructures: first, new infrastructural elements (such as bicycle infrastructure and new public transit systems) have become important in contemporary cities. Second, cities and states have changed the ways in which they deal with established infrastructures (such as privatization and financialization). Third, infrastructures are seen as not purely technical phenomena, as they tended to be understood previously, but as incorporated into social practices. Additionally, a recent upsurge in assemblage studies, actor-network theory and science, and technology studies in urban studies and beyond (Farías and Bender, 2010; Graham and Marvin, 2001) has changed the focus of social research: it has become much more attentive to technical aspects that were previously considered to be merely the concerns of engineers. This emerging set of literature, as will be discussed later, has shown how urban infrastructures are linking technologies: they highlight ways in which cities and societies are socio-material, and how infrastructures are entangled within symbolic meanings.

Urban infrastructures as linking technologies

Infrastructures link processes on various scales (Furlong, 2010): while they always involve specific locations, being thus local, they also link political and economic processes, including authorities on various scales (McFarlane and Rutherford, 2008). Airports, ports and motorways are all in different ways localized, but their functions involve far more than their immediate locality. Discussing a pipeline from Baku to Ceyhan via Tbilisi, Barry (2013) shows how the international project is rooted in local power structures and struggles for political recognition. Similarly, human bodies and the urban level meet at the scale of the home. While in modern cities infrastructures tend to be hidden from the residents’ eyes – as the often unnoticed and taken for granted access to water in modern homes vividly shows (Kaika, 2004) – they do the work of linking citizens to one another and to the state. Infrastructures connect society more tightly than does, for instance, the process of voting (Tonkiss, 2013). Infrastructures are thus arteries of cities (Joyce, 2003; Tonkiss, 2013) as well as of societies in general. They are socio-technologies that link objects and technologies, and enable other objects – human and non-human – to operate (Larkin, 2013).

While the key characteristic of infrastructures is their capacity to link, hence not being scalar, the ‘urban’ aspect of infrastructures brings about some specificities. Of course, cities are not isolated entities. But while cities rely on a high concentration of technical networks extending far from the dense urban cores (Brenner, 2014; Graham, 2010), they are, at the same time, interlinked with various presences of ‘natural’ features including green spaces, parks, urban agriculture, rivers, lakes and wastelands. Combined with cities’ particular exposure to vulnerabilities, the complex concentrations of the technical and the ‘natural’, and the human and non-human (Amin and Thrift, 2017), cities pose particular challenges for understanding and coping with infrastructures. Many of these challenges are related to how infrastructures can and should be developed in order to balance the conflicting interests of life quality, economic attractiveness, ecological sustainability and political representation: interests and developments can also mean the displacement of some social groups in order to provide space for others (Rao, 2014). Moreover, while associated with dynamics and future progress, infrastructures often make cities obdurate in terms of material stability: once they are built, they are resource heavy, time-consuming and expensive to change (Hommels, 2005).

Finally, there are various types of infrastructural hardware concentrated and interlinked in cities, among them transport infrastructures, green infrastructures and housing infrastructures. As characteristic and relatively well-researched urban features, they are key for the cities’ economic, social, ecological and cultural well-being.

‘Transport infrastructure’ refers to nodes and networks that facilitate flows of people, goods and ideas between and within places (Alff et al., 2014; Kreutzmann, 1991; Reeves, 2011). But money launderi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Linking post-socialist and urban infrastructures
• 2 Energy poverty in Central and Eastern Europe: Understanding the European Union’s core-periphery divide
• 3 The thermodynamics of the social contract: Making infrastructures visible in the case of district heating in two towns in Serbia and Croatia
• 4 Ideologies and informality in urban infrastructure: The case of housing in Soviet and post-Soviet Baku
• 5 Changing times, persistent inequalities?: Patterns of housing infrastructure development in the South Caucasus
• 6 Post-Soviet ‘nuclear’ towns as multi-scalar infrastructures: Relating sovereignty and urbanity through the perspective of Visaginas
• 7 Green infrastructure in post-socialist cities: Evidence and experiences from Eastern Germany, Poland and Russia
• 8 Moscow urban development: Neoliberal urbanism and green infrastructures
• 9 Bengaluru’s urban water infrastructure through the lens of post-socialism
• 10 Public transport in Brno: From socialist to post-socialist rhythms
• 11 Predictability and propinquity on the Sofia Metro: Everyday metro journeys and long-term relations of transport infrastructuring
• 12 Infrastructures as fluidities: How marshrutkas help us to overcome static conceptions of road-based mobility service provision
• 13 Conclusion: Infrastructure and post-socialism in theory and practice
• Index