Weird Exoskeletons: Propositional Politics and the Making of Home in Underground Bucharest

Abstract

The article explores the politics of life underground in Bucharest, Romania. It focuses on a tunnel passing under Bucharest's central train station, where a community of drug users and so‐called ‘homeless’ have made a long‐standing home, using a space that many others considered uninhabitable. Relying on extensive ethnographic observations and interviews undertaken within the tunnels, the article traces and illustrates the socio‐material entanglements characterizing life underground. It frames this assemblage of bodies, veins, syringes, substances and various relationships of power and affect, as a ‘propositional politics’ of home and life at the margins. Such a politics speaks of drug addiction and extreme marginalization, but also of a sense of belonging, reciprocal trust and care. In tracing such a politics, the article does not aim to romanticize the status of home in the underground or to treat it as the marginal antithesis of normative homeliness, but to reveal the ways in which an affirmative, self‐grounding politics of home emerges from the immanence of tunnel life within the fabric of the city. As such, the article contributes to debates around homing practices in conditions of uninhabitability and proposes a radical approach to the politics of life at the margins in the contemporary urban.

Evictions as infrastructural events

“…Subway tunnels and cars, buses, and other public transportation equipment function as temporary sites for thermal comfort, heating, cooling, and sleeping (Toth, 1993). For instance, the municipal pipes that transport heat around Bucharest above and below ground attract homeless people in search of thermal comfort, who use them as shelters (O'Neill, 2017, p. 20;Lancione, 2019Lancione, , 2020. Similarly, the E subway train in NYC, attracts the largest number of homeless people, because it circulates, unlike other lines, exclusively underground, relatively insulated from extreme weather (Correal & Norman, 2018).…”

Segmenting the city: McDonald’s, the Metro, and the mobilization of the middle classes underground

“…This ongoing strategy hinges upon a fundamental reimagining of the urban underground's class politics. Although subterranean Bucharest had become, since the end of socialism, widely associated with Dickensian forms of poverty and immiserization (see Belzberg, 2001;Lancione, 2019), city planners and developers proposed to "mobilize" the middle classes into a redesigned underground-one that is materially staged by global and national brands, such as the McDonald's franchise (Miller and Rose, 1997: 2; see also Rose, 1999). 3 In a moment of unchecked global inequality (Piketty, 2014), this article examines the efforts of city planners and corporate managers to segment the city above from the city below, professional elites and foreign investors from the new middle classes, in pursuit of economic growth.…”

Underground Inscriptions

“…The tunnels become known to me as a fluid assemblage of pipes and veins , an interlace forming a living infrastructure making life possible underground (Amin 2014). In a vitalist sense, this infrastructure can be seen as that shared plane where the economy of being at home was gathered in injecting heroine and mephedrone, but also in constructing collective assemblages of care by sharing food; by shouting at each other; by watching TV; by exchanging water, doses, and money; by climbing above ground to reconnect the tunnel's electricity cable to the public lamp; by buying petrol for the electric generator; by scavenging copper wires and other scrap materials from the city's trash bins, bringing them down, arranging them according to value and use, and bringing them out again for sale to recyclers; and by many other everyday matters, all taking place within and with a tunnel planned for energy efficiency and collective consumption by the Republica Socialistă România decades ago (see Lancione 2019c).…”

“…Resistant to light and to immediate appropriation, they become visible only if one sees their own markings, their own way of tracing life on earth. In their being in between evident traces and outright ghosts, they reveal with their translucence how life at the margins is possible on its own terms, speaking the proposition of the uninhabitable in its own grammar, at its own tempo (Lancione 2019c). If tracing is about retrieval, inscription requires a more nuanced hermeneutic approach, one attentive to the complex making of weird assemblages and their politics.…”