Paper short abstract:

Over 45% of Mongolia's population now call the capital city, Ulaanbaatar, home, 60% of whom dwell in the peri-urban 'ger districts' that circle the city centre. This paper explores intimate daily life on these margins, focusing on infrastructural realities and residents' relations to the state.

Paper long abstract:

The ger districts of Ulaanbaatar ring the capital city of Mongolia. Sprawling peri-urban areas characterised by unpaved roads, lack of running water and disconnected from the city's heating and sewerage systems, ger districts are named after the felt-walled yurts (ger in Mongolian) that countryside herders have moved to the city during the waves of post-socialist rural-to-urban migration. As the ger districts have come into being, the archetypal nomadic architectural form, the ger, has become fixed in space. The collection of thousands of fixed gers thus stands both as an allegory for and also a literal manifestation of the liminality of those who no longer live in the countryside and yet do not dwell in the city. Ger districts are precarious spaces in which one has to run to keep still: infrastructurally-speaking they force their residents to move, for example, to collect water, wood or coal; and yet residents lack access to the types of social and material 'movement' enjoyed by city centre residents. This paper draws on long-term fieldwork among both ger district residents and local government workers to explore the intimate everyday experiences of negotiating social and material life on these margins. It examines ger district residents' understanding of their relation to the state, one that is experienced primarily in infrastructural terms as a relationship of abandonment. Finally, it interrogates the ways in which contradictory dynamics of movement echo across multiple scales, examining how the unique infrastructure of the ger districts re-configures networks of relations in particular ways.