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This article explores the types of actions that are dramatically shaping the formation of the peri-urban economic landscape of the ger areas in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Drawing from numerous interviews and ethnographic fieldwork in and around a bus stop on the northern edge of the city, we trace the experience of two different women who each carve out a life and livelihood on this urban fringe. Examining the types of strategies they employ to secure land and employment, we argue that negotiations, speculation and enactions of relationships are vastly influential in shaping Ulaanbaatar's urban economy from the ground up. Drawing from the anthropology of generative capitalism and the fungibility and heterogeneous nature of money, we discuss how the making of capitalist urban economies in Ulaanbaatar implicates a variety of decisions and materials, perceptions of the state, and local economies of exchange and reciprocity. Central to the shaping of these urban economies, we argue, are emerging moral quandaries and ethics arising out of these entanglements.

This article explores the experience of living among diverse infrastructural configurations in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, and forms of stigmatisation that arise as a result. In this capital city that experiences extremely cold winters, the provision of heat is a seasonal necessity. Following a history of socialist-era, centrally provided heating, Ulaanbaatar is now made up of a core area of apartments and other buildings undergoing increased expansion, surrounded by vast areas of fenced land plots ( ger districts) not connected to centrally provided heating. In these areas, residents have historically heated their homes through burning coal, a technique that has resulted in seasonal air pollution. Expanding out from Wacquant’s definition of territorial stigmatisation, this article discusses the links between heat generation, air pollution and environmental stigmatisation arising from residents’ association with or proximity to the effects of heat generation and/or infrastructural lack. This type of stigma complexifies the normative divide between the city’s two main built areas. Residents’ attempts to mitigate forms of building and infrastructural ‘quality’ or chanar (in Mongolian) form ways of negotiating their position as they seek different kinds of property. Here, not only are bodies vulnerable to forms of pollution (both air and otherwise), but also buildings and infrastructure are vulnerable to disrepair. Residents’ assessments of infrastructural and building quality move beyond any categorisation of them being a clear ‘resistance’ to deteriorating infrastructural conditions. Instead, an ethnographic lens that positions the viewpoint of the city through these residential experiences reveals a reconceptualisation of the city that challenges infrastructurally determined normative assumptions.

This paper explores the concept of social sustainability in Ulaanbaatar’s ger districts in relation to access and mobility. Although ger districts are well-established in Mongolian culture as ephemeral encampments with transient residents, contemporary ger districts have become large and permanent residential districts that are now home to an estimated one-third of the country’s population. The more recent growth of the ger districts has taken place in three decades since Mongolia embraced market-based liberal economics, coinciding with waves of socially and economically-motivated urbanisation. More recently, difficult environmental conditions in rural Mongolia have created new waves of migration. The unfolding situation means that the ger districts have grown with little of the forward planning present in other built areas of the city. In turn, this has led to significant imbalances in the provision of transport services into the ger districts and the problems of access and mobility that this paper has highlighted. This paper has identified community-based local transport and delivery services as one potential means for addressing existing access and mobility shortcomings. Such approaches could provide temporary or complementary services alongside other public policy approaches.

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