Off-grid: Trading infrastructure for atmosphere in Bucharest, Romania
研究了罗马尼亚布加勒斯特郊区居民自愿脱离市政电网、选择无基本服务的“美式”住宅的现象，揭示了这种交易如何影响居民的城市归属感和全球身份认同。
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.