IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/envirc/v43y2025i5p882-897.html

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
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Maria Kaika & Erik Swyngedouw, 2000. "Fetishizing the modern city: the phantasmagoria of urban technological networks," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 24(1), pages 120-138, March.
    2. Prince K. Guma, 2021. "Recasting Provisional Urban Worlds in the Global South: Shacks, Shanties and Micro-Stalls," Planning Theory & Practice, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 22(2), pages 211-226, March.
    3. Ananya Roy, 2011. "Slumdog Cities: Rethinking Subaltern Urbanism," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 35(2), pages 223-238, March.
    4. AbdouMaliq Simone & Vanesa Castán Broto, 2022. "Radical unknowability: an essay on solidarities and multiform urban life," City, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 26(5-6), pages 771-790, November.
    5. Aleksandar D. Slaev & Zorica Nedović-Budić & Nikola Krunić & Jasna Petrić & Diliana Daskalova, 2018. "Suburbanization and sprawl in post-socialist Belgrade and Sofia," European Planning Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 26(7), pages 1389-1412, July.
    6. Liette Gilbert & Feike De Jong, 2015. "Entanglements of Periphery and Informality in Mexico City," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 39(3), pages 518-532, May.
    7. Charlotte Lemanski, 2023. "Broadening the landscape of post-network cities: a call to research the off-grid infrastructure transitions of the non-poor," Landscape Research, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 48(2), pages 174-186, February.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Kerry Bobbins & Federico Caprotti & Jiska de Groot & Whitney Pailman & Mascha Moorlach & Hendrik Schloemann & Alex Densmore & Kimenthrie Finlay & Ellen Fischat & Siseko Siwali & Joslyn Links, 2024. "Smart and disruptive infrastructures: Re-building knowledge on the informal city," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 61(1), pages 165-179, January.
    2. Monika Streule & Ozan Karaman & Lindsay Sawyer & Christian Schmid, 2020. "Popular Urbanization: Conceptualizing Urbanization Processes Beyond Informality," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 44(4), pages 652-672, July.
    3. María José Álvarez Rivadulla & Diana Bocarejo, 2014. "Beautifying the Slum: Cable Car Fetishism in Cazucá, Colombia," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 38(6), pages 2025-2041, November.
    4. Quitzow, Leslie & Rohde, Friederike, 2022. "Imagining the smart city through smart grids? Urban energy futures between technological experimentation and the imagined low-carbon city," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 59(2), pages 341-359.
    5. Malini Ranganathan, 2014. "Paying for Pipes, Claiming Citizenship: Political Agency and Water Reforms at the Urban Periphery," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 38(2), pages 590-608, March.
    6. Almeida, Renan P. & Hungaro, Lucas, 2021. "Water and sanitation governance between austerity and financialization," Utilities Policy, Elsevier, vol. 71(C).
    7. Ugo Rossi & Arturo Di Bella, 2017. "Start-up urbanism: New York, Rio de Janeiro and the global urbanization of technology-based economies," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 49(5), pages 999-1018, May.
    8. Christine Hentschel, 2015. "Postcolonializing Berlin and The Fabrication of The Urban," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 39(1), pages 79-91, January.
    9. Lucy Hewitt & Stephen Graham, 2015. "Vertical cities: Representations of urban verticality in 20th-century science fiction literature," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 52(5), pages 923-937, April.
    10. Anguelovski, Isabelle & Martínez Alier, Joan, 2014. "The ‘Environmentalism of the Poor’ revisited: Territory and place in disconnected glocal struggles," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 102(C), pages 167-176.
    11. Harshavardhan Jatkar, 2024. "BODIES AGAINST MODERNITY: Politics of Slum Rehabilitations in India," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 48(1), pages 111-125, January.
    12. COLIN McFARLANE, 2008. "Governing the Contaminated City: Infrastructure and Sanitation in Colonial and Post‐Colonial Bombay," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 32(2), pages 415-435, June.
    13. Victoria Ruiz Rincón & Joan Martínez-Alier & Sara Mingorria, 2019. "Environmental Conflicts Related to Urban Expansion Involving Agrarian Communities in Central Mexico," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 11(23), pages 1-19, November.
    14. Catherine Crawford & Sarah Bell, 2012. "Analysing the Relationship between Urban Livelihoods and Water Infrastructure in Three Settlements in Cusco, Peru," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 49(5), pages 1045-1064, April.
    15. Liza Rose Cirolia & Jesse Harber, 2022. "Urban statecraft: The governance of transport infrastructures in African cities," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 59(12), pages 2431-2450, September.
    16. Jane Zheng & Xiaohua Zheng, 2022. "Does Public Participation Matter to Planning? Urban Sculpture Reception in the Context of Elite-Led Planning in Shanghai," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 14(19), pages 1-22, September.
    17. Seth Schindler, 2014. "Producing and contesting the formal/informal divide: Regulating street hawking in Delhi, India," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 51(12), pages 2596-2612, September.
    18. Hanna Baumann & Haim Yacobi, 2022. "Introduction: Infrastructural stigma and urban vulnerability," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 59(3), pages 475-489, February.
    19. Chihsin Chiu, 2024. "Greening informality through metabolic coordination: An urban political ecology of governing extralegal housing forms in Taiwan," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 61(6), pages 1127-1146, May.
    20. Aseela Haque, 2024. "Inhabiting Flyover Geographies: Flows, Interstices, and Walking Bodies in Karachi," Urban Planning, Cogitatio Press, vol. 9.

    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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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.