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Paper short abstract

This paper shows how Bucharest’s district heating system endures through continuous practices of maintenance. Provisional fixes and emergency labor sustain the access to hot water and heating amid material decay and institutional fragmentation.

Paper long abstract

In Bucharest’s district heating system, repair is not a response to breakdown but the labor through which infrastructure endures. The city operates the largest centralized heating network in the European Union, built during the socialist era to ensure universal access to hot water and heating. Since the 1990s, disinvestment and fragmented governance have left the system in chronic decline. Rather than being renewed through modernization, it persists through continual acts of repair that stabilize an increasingly fragile network, albeit temporarily.

Based on ethnographic research with municipal pipe repair crews, this paper examines maintenance as labor characterized by provisional fixes (cârpeală), emergency interventions, and improvisation. Workers remain permanently on call, responding to leaks while navigating bureaucratic procedures that delay action and diffuse responsibility. Their work unfolds at the intersection of material urgency and administrative constraint, showing how infrastructure is sustained through negotiation among decaying matter, institutional limits, and embodied expertise. Through these practices, crews maintain both the circulation of heat and the expectation that the system will continue to function.

While energy transition and decarbonization shape policy and funding priorities, they remain largely detached from the conditions workers confront underground. I argue that repair labor enacts a pragmatic ethics of endurance rather than transformation. Often resented yet indispensable, repair workers negotiate invisibility through humor, self-stylization, and collective pride in their ability to 'hold the city together.' By foregrounding everyday repair, the paper shows how energy systems persist through uneven, morally charged, and deeply relational labor.