Post-Socialist Urban Infrastructures
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178 11 Predictability and propinquity on the Sofia Metro Everyday metro journeys and long- term relations of transport infrastructuring Anna Plyushteva Introduction Like all infrastructures, the Sofia Metro has both relational and non- relational qualities (Ash, 2013, p. 26). Its material durabilities imply an identifiable object, a bounded space. At the same time, it is defined by mul- tiple human and material relations to the outside and elsewhere. In this latter sense, the metro is not an infrastructure but an entanglement of infra- structural relations that it is party to and which it enables (Amin and Thrift, 2017, p. 17). Thus, through the everyday journeys they undertake, the passengers of the Sofia Metro not only experience particular metro service characteristics but, in so doing, continuously constitute the meanings and practices that shape the metro and the wider Sofia transport system. While the situated experiences of the metro service may be brief and mundane, they contribute to the long- term project of building, maintaining and chan- ging the city’s transport infrastructures. The present chapter works with these multiple temporalities of the Sofia Metro’s infrastructural relations. On the one hand, the everyday time- spaces of people, objects, meanings and affects represent a specific and situated ‘here and now’ of inhabiting Sofia in the late 2010s. These socio-technical entanglements, which I discuss in terms of everyday mobility practices,1 are substantial in their own right, and not simply a lens through which broader societal and political processes can be read. On the other hand, everyday practices, including those related to reliability and propinquity, both illustrate and continuously modify what is valued in relation to mobility, by whom, and at the expense of what alter- native perspectives. Because the metro project originated in state socialist Bulgaria in the 1960s and was not launched until the late 1990s, the turbulent histories of the past few decades are entangled within it. In connecting the socialist and post- socialist decades of Sofia’s history and problematizing the boundary between them, the Sofia Metro case study can respond to the need for greater historical continuity in examining post- socialist cities, a need highlighted by 179 Travel on the Sofia Metro 179 Ferenčuhová (Hirt et al., 2016). This chapter challenges perceptions of the rapid changes of ‘post- socialism’ by noting continuities of infrastructural ideals and narratives of automobility that continue to structure transport and mobility practices in Sofia. In this chapter, I use predictability and propinquity to demonstrate that the Sofia Metro is both part of the urban everyday and an ongoing project that links post-socialism to the many temporalities of transport planning in the Bulgarian capital. While the concepts of predictability and propin- quity are widely used in transport planning, they have slightly different meanings here. In its quantitative incarnation, predictability is mainly used to discuss the scheduling and reliability of trip durations. Propinquity often denotes crowdedness on public transport as distinctive from proximities within private cars, which generally involve fixed distances between commuting bodies. In this chapter, predictability and propinquity are explored qualitatively as collective socio- material practices of inhabiting the metro. The chapter suggests that such inhabitation practices are central to the way the metro creates diverse links between the infrastructural city and its inhabitants. The chapter proceeds as follows. First, I outline the theoretical traditions that inform the way infrastructure, propinquity and reliability are conceptualized in the discussion. The following section provides a brief his- tory of the Sofia Metro and describes the research project on which the chapter draws. The main body of the chapter discusses predictability and propinquity in turn, in terms of the socio-technical configurations that are being generated on the metro and construed through everyday uses and mundane interactions. Using qualitative data from repeated ride- along interviews with a group of Sofia commuters, reliability and propinquity are framed as two dimensions of the relationship between the metro and the city – a relationship that is contemporary and immediate, as well as histor- ical. Through mundane mobility and the meanings and practices it generates, I show that, since 2012, the metro infrastructure and the city have been intermittently connected by links of differentiation, complementarity and inseparability. While propinquity and predictability are made on the metro with the specific materialities such as those of trains, tickets and turnstiles, they also shape broader meanings for Sofia mobility, most notably in rela- tion to automobility. I argue that metro practices should be read as both situated in the metro space and excessive to it, suggesting that meanings linked to the private car are particularly significant in the way metro pro- pinquity and predictability are construed. Relational perspectives on (post- socialist) infrastructuring Thinking relationally about infrastructure entails accounting for its multiple spatialities and temporalities, and conceiving of infrastructural flows as more than the movement of matter through matter. The Sofia Metro has material 180 180 A. Plyushteva properties that distinguish it from other transport infrastructures and urban spaces in contemporary Sofia. When discussing the everyday practices of its users, it is important to pay attention to their situatedness. A journey through Sofia by metro is unlike another journey because of the specific socio- material interactions involved (Latour, 1991). The metro is made up of underground track tunnels and stations, as well as some visually distinctive covered overground tracks in the outskirts of the city. Barriers require the validation of tickets on entry and turnstiles define the rhythm of exiting a station. It has a recognizable visual identity through logos, maps and signs. However, these are not uniform but rather constitute a patchwork, reflecting the lengthy and incremental construction of the Sofia Metro. At the same time, the metro is not just an infrastructural system. It is defined by relations of infrastructuring, which bind it to a range of human and non- human actors, from passengers and cars at street level to station staff and train drivers, to car parking bays, trams, cycle lanes, electricity and data cables, and to various urban places with their distinctive and chan- ging meanings and atmospheres. In this sense, a metro is not a ‘thing’ but a process of making, sustaining, changing and severing relations (Amin and Thrift, 2017; Carse, 2012). It is in these relations that the work of the metro as an urban infrastructure is enacted, because they entail supporting, enab- ling, disrupting, connecting and fragmenting the multiple ways in which a city is inhabited (Latham and Wood, 2015). One mode of living with the Sofia Metro and its infrastructural relations is to perform mundane metro journeys. Looking closely at the everyday practices of those who regularly ride the metro is particularly helpful in accounting for the spatial ‘excess’ of infrastructure: the excess is especially visible in the trajectories of mundane journeys, which through repetition make the metro a sustained yet changing part of urban spaces and social interactions. In attending to these everyday uses of the metro, both its intrinsic and relational properties can be drawn upon in order to glimpse the ways in which the decades- old metro project, and its particular socio-material manifestations as they have come to be, shape and are shaped by post- socialist conditions in Sofia. However, ethnographic research on daily practices is not by definition well suited to accounting for the longer temporalities of infrastructure (Amin and Thrift, 2017, p. 59; Carse, 2012, p. 543). In this sense, the lens of post- socialist urbanism presents a particular opportunity because infrastructural changes of multiple directions and scales have been ongoing over recent decades, and are occurring at present at a rapid pace (Hirt, 2015; Hirt et al., 2016, p. 514). As a result, the post- socialist urban context can lend itself to the ethnographic study of the multiple temporalities of infrastructure – of everyday use, of political projects, of construction, decay and repair, and so on. Arguably, these urban dynamics make Central and Eastern European cities like Sofia more than useful sites for empirically studying the relational nature of infrastructure. They also present an opportunity for further re- theorization of infrastructural relations in a way that is consequential to 181 Travel on the Sofia Metro 181 urban theory beyond the region (Robinson, 2016; Tuvikene, 2016). Thus, in the case of the Sofia Metro project, the ‘everyday’ of everyday metro mobility speaks not only to daily repetition and current routine but also to a long history of infrastructuring the city beyond pre-defined periods and milestones. The Sofia Metro is not simply an arena of the social and political processes of post- socialism, nor is it a material monument to them (Harris, 2013). Partly as a reflection of their sheer scale, complexity and cost, urban metro projects across the globe are inevitably saturated with political and ideological meanings from the earliest stages of their conception (Butcher, 2011; Gibas, 2013; Richmond, 2005; Tomic et