Acknowledging the 2025 Anthony Leeds Prize in Urban Anthropology

I am incredibly honored to accept the Anthony Leeds Prize for Urban Anthropology. It is a particularly daunting recognition. For as long as I have been a student of the city, the books recognized by the Leeds Prize have been a great inspiration. These are the books that illustrated for me rigorous fieldwork, clear and gripping prose, and most of all, a moral clarity that has shaped the way that I think, teach, and write about urban life. These have also been the books that I eagerly share with students in my seminars. That the prize committee found echoes of these qualities in Underground: Dreams and Depredations in Bucharest is both thrilling and deeply humbling. My sincere thanks to the Critical Urban Anthropology Association for their consideration of and confidence in Underground. Underground tells the story of an increasingly polarized city and how growing concerns about affordability drive urban life downward, beneath city sidewalks. I became inspired to write such a story while finishing the fieldwork for my previous book about people experiencing homelessness in Bucharest (O'Neill 2017). While hanging out at Bucharest's main railway station—the Gara de Nord—I became aware that unhoused people were squatting in the steam vents and sewer canals running beneath the station. I had also befriended people squatting in the basements and cellars of otherwise abandoned homes in nearby neighborhoods. I began tracking how both groups relied upon low-cost kiosks inside Metro stations to earn money, buy supplies, and otherwise to keep warm. I had initially envisioned this book as a study about the literalization of the long held metaphor of the “urban underclass” (Myradl 1965) with the intent of examining how life, for these unhoused communities, extended below ground. By the time I got around to beginning the fieldwork, however, the Municipality had brutally cleared the subterranean encampment in the name of health and safety. The people who had been squatting in nearby homes had also been moved along. While Underground's underlying question as to how urban life extends downward endured, nothing about the fieldwork unfolded as I had initially imagined. Perhaps predictably, the forcible clearance of the unhoused from central Bucharest's basements, tunnels, and sewer canals in the mid 2010s was accompanied by a steady buzz about urban beautification. What I did not expect, and what pointed to a more empirically complicated finding, was that these calls for beautification were coupled with editorials, mayoral addresses, and city planning documents that identified the city's new middle classes as a troubling source of blight. These voices insisted that the middle class's growing appetite for new cars and apartments had congested roads and overtaken sidewalks, polluted the air, and degraded the quality and character of public spaces. The middle classes were accused of physically overwhelming the city, threatening the very kind of foreign investments that had made their growth possible in the first place. The proposed solution to the problem was simple enough: move the middle classes underground. Between the summer of 2014 and the winter of 2019, I followed the path that this massive intervention took with the aim of understanding the underground: its material depths as much as the social life that such depths make possible. During this time, I spoke only briefly with the unhoused persons and aid workers whom I had at first expected to be at the center of this book. To bring the recycled and expanded underground into ethnographic focus, I instead found myself working with city planners, private developers, architects, real estate agents, renters, homeowners, landlords, revelers and ravers, engineers, geologists, physicists, firefighters, police officers, Orthodox priests, municipal and ministry officials, boxing coaches, business executives and small business owners, advertising creatives, entrepreneurs, and interior designers. Each was invested, in one way or another, in extending the lives of the middle classes downward, beneath the city's sidewalk. What became very clear as the fieldwork took shape was that this gentrification story had unexpected coordinates. In this moment of economic polarization, the middle classes were not the beneficiaries of this gentrification process as they are typically presumed to be. Rather, I found that Bucharest's middle classes were its focus: they were getting swept up by the very structural forces of gentrification that usually target the poor in ways that were both familiar and novel. As Bucharest became increasingly overcrowded and unaffordable, I tracked the development of the urban underground as an effort to absorb the middle classes. And so for this book, the “urban underground” is no metaphor. Underground shuttles beneath Bucharest's constellation of Metro stations and pedestrian pathways, basements and cellars, bunkers and crypts to make the argument that the city's subterranean extensions enable a ranked ordering of urban life. As spiraling inequality works to exclude the very poor and vulnerable from the city by pushing them away from centers of wealth and privilege, the novel perspective of the underground reveals how upstairs-downstairs dynamics increasingly characterize the experience of those who remain within the city. The basic observation is that the very elite do not just live in the city center; they live on top of it—inside office and residential towers that have pushed Bucharest's skyline ever higher. At the same time, urban development has also pressed the middle classes downward, renovating and expanding one segment of the metropolis stacked beneath another. Underground argues that these subterranean developments can be sites of dreams and aspirations in that they open a space for the middle classes to move through, live, work, and play in an increasingly unaffordable and crowded city. At the same time, the book shows, these opportunities are not without costs. At the edges of efforts to make the underground a viable place for the middle classes to be, the underground's dark, dank, and precarious traces always threaten to seep through, revealing the indignities that come with being incorporated by way of the basement door. It is at the intersection of these two experiences of the gentrified urban underground—dreams and degradation, aspirations and anxiety—that Bucharest's overworked and underpaid middle classes are taking shape. What I hope this book makes clear, ultimately, is the need to account for the city's verticality when thinking about belonging and urban life. In addition to horizontal concerns about who is in the city and who has been pressed outside of it, Underground draws attention to the gradations of belonging that are marked by vertical concerns as to who is on top and who is on the bottom of the city. My sincere thanks again to the Critical Urban Anthropology Association and to the Prize Committee. I am heartened to have Underground received in the spirit in which it was researched and written. This work was supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation (9351).