Post-socialist urban infrastructures: learning from systems of less

Abstract

The paper highlights the importance of attending to (post-)socialist experiences in infrastructural research and practice for understanding and shaping infrastructure-related transitions. Historical infrastructural experiences, materialities and practices inform, we argue, contemporary struggles for sustainable, resilient infrastructures and pathways towards sustainability transitions. We refer to the case of (post-)socialist Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), which has witnessed a historically unique transition from statesponsored large technological systems to fragmented and ailing neoliberal provision - a process unrivalled anywhere in the world in terms of its scale and speed. Such broad shifts were accompanied by practices of adaptation in policies and everyday practices alike. Indeed, discussions centring on a likely future era of frugality given the climate crisis call for the assessment of broadly comparable past experiences. This paper develops the argument over two stages. First, we question the prevalent lack of studies of (post-)socialist experiences and practices in infrastructure scholarship despite some key advances over the last years. Second, we argue that CEE infrastructural practices and experiences are relevant to studies of future transitions to sustainability and resilience, even beyond the particular regional context. Infrastructural practices of adaptation in our region of interest reflect different "systems of less" that we frame as (1) "system of resource scarcity", (2) "system of state failure", as well as (3) "system of no awareness" which were characteristic of socialist and post-socialist era infrastructuring. As neither the state nor the society at-large in CEE countries have shown significant consciousness of sustainability goals, sustainable practices might rather be instances of accidental infrastructural practices of sustainability, yet they share some parallels with sustainable infrastructure planning.