Flowing Progress: Transforming the Danube Through Infrastructure (Central European Studies)

Flowing Progress: Transforming the Danube Through Infrastructure focuses on how different political regimes and forms of governance have imagined and technologically transformed the most international river in the world. Multidisciplinary and drawing on methodologies of history, anthropology of infrastructure, and science, technology, and society, this collection explores the tensions between the river and its natural pulses, the humans that populate its floodplains, state agencies, and infrastructure. The book engages the concept of disturbance to point out the circular and spiraling dynamics between hydrological processes and technopolitical and economic practices. Disturbance denotes a specific type of long-term dynamic between human attempts to control the Danube, the material systems they implemented to achieve these goals, and the agency of the river that both enabled the functioning of infrastructure and the breakdown of such arrangements. It draws particular attention to the concerted efforts to contain and optimize the Danube’s flow, adding layer after layer of dams, channels, and pipes that could potentially escalate the power of a leashed river. Taking a longer historical perspective from the sixteenth century until today, the volume provides a variety of relevant case studies and local contexts in the Ottoman and Habsburg empires, and their successor states Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, and Serbia which show different ways of how humans have imagined and coped with this mighty river.

Stefan Dorondel is an anthropologist and environmental historian working for the Francisc I. Rainer Institute of Anthropology Bucharest and the Institute for South-East European Studies of the Romanian Academy. He is the author or coauthor of three books, and most recently coedited A New Ecological Order: Development and the Transformation of Nature in Eastern Europe. His research interests include rivers and wetlands, infrastructure, rewilding, and ecological restoration.

Luminita Gatejel is a senior researcher at the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies in Regensburg. She received her PhD from the University of Tübingen and was a Max Weber fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. She has published extensively on the history of automobility, everyday life, and consumption in the Eastern Bloc. Her latest book is Engineering the Lower Danube: Technology and International Cooperation in an Imperial Borderland.