The book examines multi-scaler transformations in the housing estates of a Romanian post-industrial city using ethnographic research methods. The theoretical approach draws on anthropological studies of the home and its infrastructure to address both aesthetic and functional issues affecting residents in a present-day Romanian block of flats. The author returns to her hometown to study material culture and infrastructure, while exploring the experience of people as social agents of change and their social life. The story of a block of flats in Piatra Neamţ as a social life of materials in interaction with people, neighborhoods, and housing institutions is richly illustrated. Architectural drawings, photographs, interviews, and insights from the mundane struggle to cope with ever growing prices of utilities, repairs, and stressful urban life construct an engaging personal narrative.
The locus of study is the disrepair of urban infrastructure imposed by post-socialist urban transformations. It is about the death and life of small Romanian towns, with shrinking and ageing population, where 80% of the people were housed in 32,000 newly built apartments during socialism. The block of flats is reconstructed using functional elements—the water tap, the radiator, the window, the staircase—each representing the building’s material boundaries interconnected with the social agents that reshape them. These elements serve as the organizing structure of the book.
Reimagining the insulation of windows, enclosure of balconies, and the colorful thermal insulation on the façade are explored with great attention to detail. These are the most visible changes of post-socialist housing transformation, often driven by the new housing market realities as well as the residents’ reaction to shifts in the management of invisible heat and water infrastructure networks. H2B—the Romanian block of flats—exemplifies the typical, stubborn coping mechanism of its residents to deal with privatization, infrastructural deficit, limited access to EU funds for energy retrofits, and the incapacity of government to address these issues. Minute ethnographic detail demonstrates how the social order is created and maintained through materiality of the building and forced interaction of homeowners and service agents in a less transparent and transactional world.
Throughout the book, the departure from a “command system” of housing provision, with deregulation of housing markets and privatization of infrastructure is revisited in each chapter as the main trigger of urban decline. In this context, homeowners in the blocks of flats are faced with the triple challenge of aging infrastructure and deteriorating panel buildings, affordability constraints, and a lack of condominium management to deal with the complexity of vertical living (Sasha Tsenkova, Housing Policy Reforms in Post-Socialist Europe: Lost in Transition). Predictably, the deterioration in panel buildings has reached a critical stage, with substantial needs for investment in engineering systems and buildings. While this problem is observed in the housing estates across Europe, the absence of efficient intermediaries (condominiums and homeowners associations), makes it difficult to mobilize funds for investment in renovation leading to further deterioration of socialist housing (Daniel Baldwin Hess, Tiit Tammaru, and Maarten van Ham, Housing Estates in Europe: Poverty, Ethnic Segregation and Policy Challenges). In addition, affordability constraints faced by households and their strategies to cope with the escalating price of utilities reduce their ability to invest in maintenance and renovation (Hans-Joachim Dubel, W. Jan Brzeski, and Ellen Hamilton, “Rental Choice and Housing Policy Realignment in Transition: Post-privatization Challenges in the Europe and Central Asia Region” World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 3884).
The saga of H2B illustrates the disintegration of the social mix in post-socialist housing. In the absence of government support for utility services, more affluent owners continue to subsidize their neighbors. Others just cut back on individual consumption, such as central heating, or refuse to contribute to common expenses. The meticulous account of different coping mechanisms illustrates the social challenges of the housing transition. Despite the lack of a coherent conceptual framework in the book, the empirical evidence provides a rich mosaic of stories and lived experiences illustrating the rapid transformation of egalitarian societies in post-socialist cities. Stories of unpaid bills, poverty, despair, home-grown management ingenuity, and constant struggle with bureaucracy define the ethnographic narrative.
I recommend this book to housing scholars and practitioners interested in the pragmatic and symbolic implications of vertical living in eastern Europe and beyond. The transformation tells a larger story about the relationship between the esthetic and the political. The book will be of interest to researchers of post-socialist cities due to its conceptual emphasis on the relationship between aging infrastructure, building transformation, and people’s choices. Conflicts, connections, and reactions explored at a granular level have wider social meaning that redefines notions of public and private, social change and vertical living.
