Infrastructures of Scarcity: Urban Transformations and Austerity in Socialist and Postsocialist Romania

This project examines the spatial reorganization of Romanian cities during two distinct periods of economic crisis that were marked by significant expansions of state-led, urban and infrastructure development. In its last decade in power, the Communist Party undertook massive public works projects, even as its austerity measures drastically curbed universal provision. Two decades later, after Romania's 2007 European Union (EU) accession and at the start of the global economic crisis, local governments embarked on a publicly funded development campaign, reshaping not only urban space but also local governance. This fast-track infrastructure development campaign has set in motion widespread expropriations, demolitions, and population displacement. After massive public expenditures, the nation's urban landscape is marked by uneven development--a patchwork of seemingly redundant infrastructure upgrading and beautification projects in localities that remain mired in staggering disinvestment./nBased on three years of field research in Romania, this dissertation makes three contributions. First, this project contributes to studies of infrastructure development by examining how the expansion of infrastructure in Romania becomes a key mechanism in the extraction of resources and the socialization of the costs of economic crises. Seized by political patronage networks through selective and discretionary allocations of EU and public funds, public infrastructure has become a vehicle for the capture and redirection of public resources. This dissertation takes a different approach from those chronicling the collapse and privatization of public infrastructure after three decades of neoliberal urban policies. With a focus on post-EU accession Romania, this project relocates the state at the center of analysis. The seemingly inefficient or unneeded expansion of infrastructure can be productively examined when we understand infrastructure as not simply a public resource, access to which is either universal or divided, but also as an accumulation mechanism. If we view public infrastructure as a "resource that generates more resources," as Katherine Verdery terms the state's drive to accumulate means of production, we can analyze its expansion as the creation of new avenues for resource extraction./nSecond, this study reconsiders literature that links the production of uneven development in postsocialist regions to inter-urban competition and a retrenchment of the public sector. It examines, instead, how the urban restructuring of recent years is driven by an expansion of state interventions in the built environment, and mobilized by what can be described as the emergence of an allocative form of local governance. This restructuring is organized around the pursuit of EU and public funding and land grabs, and the capture of such resources for political and private interests. The driving force, however, is not to maximize revenue but to maximize the allocative power of local coalitions of state actors./nThird, through an examination of the shortage economy of late socialism and the effects of the recent global recession in Romania, this project problematizes the common conception that periods of economic crisis present key speculative opportunities for paper architecture. In contrast to these views, this dissertation examines crises as key events in which the practice of architecture becomes politicized through its coupling with the notion of development. In this context, architects operate not as cultural producers with aesthetic autonomy, but as agents of central and local government institutions. In its manifold entanglements with the promise of development, architecture becomes both embedded in, and disconnected from, the redistribution of resources. Specifically, by mobilizing societal resources in the service of development, architecture embeds the promise of a better future in the built environment and provides a physical template for overcoming the failures of the present order. As such, architecture and new construction become the material markers of a new beginning in the linear, teleological temporality of development. By diverting resources away from basic needs, the practice of architecture in communist Romania became a mechanism that justified the shortages and sacrifices of the present while simultaneously allowing for a selective distribution of public resources through a state agenda that defied and disengaged from the material limitations of the present moment.

Advisor: AlSayyad, Nezar