Paper short abstract:

Attention to the shifting ‘quality’ of building infrastructure produces a materialist ethics of the urban among residents in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. This allows residents to subtly challenge urban power relations while negotiating the daily minutiae of infrastructural breakdown and possibility.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines how residents of middle-income apartment housing negotiate access to unequally applied residential building infrastructure in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. It examines residential perspectives of urban infrastructural connectivity and the roles of apartment owner’s associations within this. Fast rates of urban growth since 2010 have resulted in large amounts of middle-income residential housing being built. However, ageing socialist-era heating infrastructure plus a greater demand on water and other infrastructures has resulted in newly built housing having uneven forms of infrastructural connectivity in this extremely cold capital city.

In doing so, this paper presents a subtle perspectival shift away from the anthropology of urban infrastructures themselves, towards the anthropology of residential urban aesthetic detection and perceptions of infrastructural quality. It examines how residents pay close attention to the material nature of surrounding urban environments to try and anticipate and stop future breakage or rupture. This, I argue, produces a materialist ethics of the urban, where attention to urban aesthetic detail produces critiques of the types of relations of power shaping the city. However, while this materialist ethics presents a way in which residents aim to shape a ‘good city’ from below, it is also in flux – producing moral ambiguities that shapes resident’s relations with each other. I will discuss this through examining the role apartment owner’s associations which form groups of residents who bridge the divide between residents of buildings and the market of infrastructural provision and the municipal governance of urban infrastructure.