The thermodynamics of the social contract: Making infrastructures visible in the case of district heating in two towns in Serbia and Croatia

Abstract

The chapter shows how people in two post-Yugoslav towns in Serbia and Croatia encountered district heating, built during socialist urbanization in former Yugoslavia. Unlike the widespread assertion in anthropology that infrastructures are usually ‘taken for granted’, and only become visible upon their physical breakdown, the chapter ethnographically shows how visibility of infrastructures was achieved through experience of a breakdown of the social contract, between the state and the people. It illustrates the ways in which infrastructural forms and the provision of heat, together with its political, technological, and social aspects, configured dynamic relations between the states and their citizens.