The lives and afterlives of the Dâmbovița: Between ghost and living river

A postsocialist, neoliberal space of reform and innovation, of projects and plans for change, the Dâmbovița River is also a space of unbridgeable material and discursive-rhetorical fractures. The river emerges as the socialist anti-natural background for the new prospects of a capitalist re-naturalized entity: its ‘deadness’ necessary for the projected ‘liveliness’ of the future river. To understand the river as multiple we look at how it creates complex and uneven mediations between space and nature, and how environmental, political and economic transformations are intertwined with the river's history. By following the Dâmbovița—historically, theoretically and ethnographically—as it flows through Bucharest, we (re)discover it not just as a multi-layered entity, but also the ways in which it has been framed and shaped materially and semiotically.