Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Bucharest’s district heating system, once a pillar of socialist welfare, now endures in a state of managed decay. Tracing everyday responses to breakdown, this paper shows how failures redistribute risk, shape social life, and produce new forms of urban infrastructural polarization.

Paper long abstract

Bucharest’s district heating (DH) system, the largest in the EU, stands as a monumental legacy of socialist urban planning: a centralized, state-managed infrastructure designed to ensure universal access to hot water and heating. Today, however, it has become a site of profound infrastructural polarizations, as the promise of universal provision collides with chronic breakdowns and prolonged uncertainty. Following decades of disinvestment and fragmented governance, the network persists in a condition of managed decay, marked by corroded pipes and recurrent outages.

This paper traces how breakdowns in the DH system create sites of contestatios within which responsibility and risk are unevenly distributed. Residents respond to interruptions by reshaping domestic routines, renegotiating social ties, and adapting their bodies to fluctuating temperatures. In contrast, municipal authorities interpret breakdowns through technical lenses, focusing on energy losses and compliance with EU decarbonisation goals. These divergent regimes of valuation reveal a growing rift between lived experience and institutional priorities.

I argue that the failures of Bucharest’s DH system actively produce new forms of polarization: between ideals of universal service and realities of selective provision, between embodied needs and infrastructural neglect, and between socialist-era expectations of welfare and market-driven, supranational modes of governance. Rather than a linear narrative of transition, the system endures through patchwork repairs, affective attachments, and unequal capacities to buffer failure. By centering heat as a material and affective force in urban life, this paper contributes to anthropological debates on energy futures in post-socialist Europe.