Социално конструиране на градската инфраструктура
The social construction of urban infrastructure

Summary/Abstract: The article deals with the specific constellation of social relations around the building of the centralized waterworks of Sofia after the formation of the Bulgarian state in 1878 and thus enters the interdisciplinary field between Science and Technology Studies and Urban History. The particular case-study is pointed to the existing discussions about failure of the modern technologies at certain places and circumstances. The knot of social relations, which envelops the waterworks, does not allow the transfer of the infrastructure to be interpreted in a straight technocratic manner (as a problem of the most efficient technical decision), neither completely economically (as a problem of the product sales in a rational and transparent system), nor just administratively (as a sanction of the success of the scientific reason, which is bringing the technological progress everywhere). The social construction of technology means not only invention or transfer of some technical equipment, but also putting it in stable frames of production, interpretation and use. The social configurations in the capital Sofia after the Liberation in 1878 are a significant obstacle for the successful building and standard functioning of the waterworks, because there are missing the agents who can “give life” to it. The resistance against the whole set of infrastructural innovations could be read as a display of the presence of alternative models of infrastructural usage, which are also specific entities of particular technologies, practices and symbolic forms. These models were eroded, but not liquidated at once by the commodification of water, on the one hand, and the changing model of use, on the other. The slow process of capitalization of the traditionalistic Bulgarian economy did not allow the new technologies of waterworks to be intertwined significantly with the industrial production. In such a sense, as a sign for the technological modernization of the economy, the introduction of waterworks could be interpreted equivocally.

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