IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/envirc/v43y2025i5p882-897.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Off-grid: Trading infrastructure for atmosphere in Bucharest, Romania

Author

Listed:
  • Bruce O’Neill

Abstract

Categorically, to be positioned off the municipal grid has meant social illegibility. Those living off-grid, in turn, have been shown necessarily to be hyper resourceful in order to improvise a claim of membership upon the city. Coming on the heels of decades of liberalizing reforms in post-socialist Romania, however, this essay turns attention onto Bucharest’s unplanned and unincorporated suburbs to detail an ongoing experiment to recast the politics of living off-grid. Beyond the reach of Bucharest’s municipal infrastructure, thousands of suburban homes have taken shape. These developments invite upwardly mobile residents to trade their socialist-era apartments located within the municipal grid for so-called “American-style†homes lacking in basic municipal services but that are newer, bigger, and more comfortable. These homes attempt to recast off-grid as a viable site for participating in an “imagined First World.†The rub, as this essay details, is that the necessary reliance upon private alternatives to the municipal grid cannot support these ambitions, leading to indignities that cast a long shadow over emergent senses of cosmopolitan belonging.

Suggested Citation

  • Bruce O’Neill, 2025. "Off-grid: Trading infrastructure for atmosphere in Bucharest, Romania," Environment and Planning C, , vol. 43(5), pages 882-897, August.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:envirc:v:43:y:2025:i:5:p:882-897
    DOI: 10.1177/23996544241293561
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23996544241293561
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1177/23996544241293561?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:envirc:v:43:y:2025:i:5:p:882-897. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.