Off-grid: Trading infrastructure for atmosphere in Bucharest, Romania

Categorically, to be positioned off the municipal grid has meant social illegibility. Those living off-grid, in turn, have been shown necessarily to be hyper resourceful in order to improvise a claim of membership upon the city. Coming on the heels of decades of liberalizing reforms in post-socialist Romania, however, this essay turns attention onto Bucharest’s unplanned and unincorporated suburbs to detail an ongoing experiment to recast the politics of living off-grid. Beyond the reach of Bucharest’s municipal infrastructure, thousands of suburban homes have taken shape. These developments invite upwardly mobile residents to trade their socialist-era apartments located within the municipal grid for so-called “American-style” homes lacking in basic municipal services but that are newer, bigger, and more comfortable. These homes attempt to recast off-grid as a viable site for participating in an “imagined First World.” The rub, as this essay details, is that the necessary reliance upon private alternatives to the municipal grid cannot support these ambitions, leading to indignities that cast a long shadow over emergent senses of cosmopolitan belonging.