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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how Bucharest residents navigate breakdowns in the district heating system, showing how the intermittent supply of hot water and heating shapes daily routines and bodily comfort. Heat emerges as a socially and politically mediated force that exposes urban inequalities.

Paper long abstract

This paper theorizes heat as a socially and materially situated ethnographic object by examining how it is sensed, interpreted, and unevenly accessed through the everyday operation—and frequent failure—of Bucharest’s district heating system. Built under socialism to guarantee universal access to hot water and heating, the system now persists in a condition of managed decay: corroded pipes, intermittent supply and austerity-driven neglect transform heat into a fluctuating, contested force.

In moments of failure, when radiators go cold, water turns lukewarm and heating disappears for days or weeks, heat becomes perceptible through residents’ thermoceptive realities, shaping notions of bodily comfort and domestic routines. Disruptions compel improvisation, adaptation and reliance on informal networks, as households reconfigure their homes as sites of thermal resilience and negotiate normative expectations of what constitutes a dignified life in present-day Bucharest.

Yet access to warmth remains deeply stratified. Households able to install alternative heating technologies buffer infrastructural failure, while others remain fully vulnerable to systemic neglect. Access to heat thus emerges as a relational marker of inequality, showing how infrastructural failure is politically and economically mediated across multiple scales. By tracing the entanglements of thermoceptive experience, urban infrastructures and post-socialist infrastructural transformations, the paper argues that heat is not merely consumed: it is lived, negotiated and unevenly distributed. In doing so, it highlights how everyday domestic thermodynamics produce enduring urban inequalities.