‘The Road from Capitalism to Capitalism’: Infrastructures of (Post)Socialism in Albania

Abstract

The overarching question of this article is how can we develop a critical understanding of the social place of highways and automobility in the case of a non-capitalist European context such as socialist Albania? Socialism was a period of modernisation for Albania. Part of this modernisation project was the production of a modern built environment, especially infrastructures and urban spaces. Within this context during socialism thousands of miles of new roads were constructed in the country. The remarkably limited use of roads, combined with their systematic building and maintenance, kept this infrastructure's materiality in a relatively good condition for many decades. Since the early 1990s, though, the end of the regime has signified a period of booming mobility and automobility. Postsocialism and the wider context of neoliberalism have been marked by state withdrawal from many of its previous roles, and the maintenance of basic infrastructures has become increasingly dependent on international aid. Nevertheless, the roads are currently being socially reappropriated and reconfigured, as people embrace automobility, which was a very limited practice during socialism. This article explores the kind of socio-material relationships that road construction and the roads themselves generated in socialist Albania and how these are linked to postsocialist spatial practices.

Post‐socialist (auto)mobilities: Modernity, freedom and citizenship

“…Roadlessness was linked to barbarism and backward lifestyle by observers of 1930s whereas road building appeared as progress, not just in Europe and America but also in the socialist world (Siegelbaum, ). Following the case of Albania, Dalakoglou () highlights that socialism was also the period of modernisation, which among other developments occurred through road construction. The road construction in Albania, nevertheless, was not accompanied by motorisation signifying instead the “concrete materialisation” of collective work that brought people together as socialist society.…”

Spectacular infrastructure and its breakdown in socialist Vietnam

“…Graham and Marvin's work is part of a growing body of literature on infrastructure and infrastructural politics under capitalism, resulting in the privatization of public works . Here, though, I shift the political‐economic context to state socialism to examine the systemic building and maintenance of urban infrastructures as the material and ideological foundations for producing new social forms, values, and persons (Dalakoglou ; Humphrey :39–40). My aim is to advance the larger project of a “critical urbanism of the contemporary networked metropolis” (Graham and Marvin :9) by tracing the generative, rippling effects of a breakdown in the public water system constructed and celebrated as spectacular infrastructure in a rebuilt socialist city.…”

Driven to sanity: An ethnographic critique of the senses in automobilities

“…Within this anthropology has carved out, albeit belatedly, a niche of ethnographic accounts of the social relations within cars (see, for example, Laurier et al . ), between cars (see, for example Yazici ), between cars and the broader milieus through which they pass (see, for example Klaeger ), including the foci of this article, post‐socialist (see, for example Dalakoglou ) and post‐war (see, for example Bishara ) milieu, and between cars and roads (Dalakoglou and Harvey ). Furthermore, building on Miller's early volume in which cars were treated as vehicles that are ‘good to think’ with (2001), the anthropology of automobility is beginning to contribute to general anthropological theory, most notably in Lipset and Handler's volume that explores the role of cars as a key (vehicular) metaphor in culture, politics and history ().…”