Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the agential powers of geothermal waters across fluctuating political landscapes. By assembling a spatiotemporal map of urban transformation in Velingrad, I trace the restructuring of hydrosocial relations as water becomes both an agent and object of change.

Paper long abstract:

How is the agency of hydrothermal resources manifested in the urban environment and what kind of socioecological relations can be traced by mapping its transformative powers? These questions guide the inquiry into the hydrosocial entanglements that are simultaneously defined by the boundaries of the built environment and act as its co-creators. Taking as a case study the resort town of Velingrad with its thermal springs, this research brings together the temporal and spatial dimensions of urban transformation and a two-scalar perspective exploring the microhistories of individual infrastructures and the mezzo- and macro-level networks they form across the political, socio-cultural, and natural landscapes of region and country.

In the late 1940s, Bulgaria’s socialist government embarked on an ambitious plan for the development of an extensive network of balneoresorts providing healthcare and holiday facilities for the growing working-class population in a rapidly industrializing country. Three villages in Southwest Bulgaria were at the forefront of this campaign and formed the neighborhoods of the new town of Velingrad – a resort of “national importance”. The access to thermal waters was no longer confined to individual buildings but was transformed into an infrastructural endeavor that required the remaking of civic life. Drawing on environmental history, political ecology, and geography of health grounded in fieldwork and archival research of urban planning records, this paper illustrates how changing socio-cultural and scientific concepts of hydrothermal resources transformed the built environment of Velingrad, while realigning the hydrosocial landscape along the contours of its emergent infrastructures.