Transgressing the Right to the City: Urban Mining and Ecotourism in Post-Industrial Romania

This article describes emerging structures of power and informal workers' everyday resistance in the context of a European Union ecotourism project in the post-industrial Romanian mining town of Balan. In 2011 and 2012, a public-private partnership began demolishing Balan's mine buildings, a project that exemplifies neoliberal capitalist urban renewal. The project also featured a new hybrid of urban reconstruction and urban mining: the extraction and resale of metal from anthropogenic supplies in wasted post-industrial buildings. Unemployed industrial workers, whom I call "informal urban miners," collected and sold metal alongside formal workers. Of primary importance to informal urban miners was attuning their skill and mode of communication to the demolition company's workers and heavy machinery. Although at first glance it looked like informal urban mining facilitated their integration into Balan's neoliberal economy, I argue that this work offered unexpected opportunities for transgressing project organizers' authority. Urban anthropologists often overlook such practices when, as in the case of informal urban mining, the differences between resistance and market activity are subtle and contingently negotiated. Informal urban miners' skill and communicative practices were complexly embedded in emerging structures of power in the post-industrial city: simultaneously a necessity of the working environment, a way of sustaining a livelihood, and a way to transgress the very order that produces and reproduces such wasted urban environments.