Accessing heat: Environmental stigma and ‘porous’ infrastructural configurations in Ulaanbaatar

Abstract

Chinese

This article explores the experience of living among diverse infrastructural configurations in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, and forms of stigmatisation that arise as a result. In this capital city that experiences extremely cold winters, the provision of heat is a seasonal necessity. Following a history of socialist-era, centrally provided heating, Ulaanbaatar is now made up of a core area of apartments and other buildings undergoing increased expansion, surrounded by vast areas of fenced land plots (ger districts) not connected to centrally provided heating. In these areas, residents have historically heated their homes through burning coal, a technique that has resulted in seasonal air pollution. Expanding out from Wacquant’s definition of territorial stigmatisation, this article discusses the links between heat generation, air pollution and environmental stigmatisation arising from residents’ association with or proximity to the effects of heat generation and/or infrastructural lack. This type of stigma complexifies the normative divide between the city’s two main built areas. Residents’ attempts to mitigate forms of building and infrastructural ‘quality’ or chanar (in Mongolian) form ways of negotiating their position as they seek different kinds of property. Here, not only are bodies vulnerable to forms of pollution (both air and otherwise), but also buildings and infrastructure are vulnerable to disrepair. Residents’ assessments of infrastructural and building quality move beyond any categorisation of them being a clear ‘resistance’ to deteriorating infrastructural conditions. Instead, an ethnographic lens that positions the viewpoint of the city through these residential experiences reveals a reconceptualisation of the city that challenges infrastructurally determined normative assumptions.

Keywords

air pollution construction energy heating infrastructure stigma Ulaanbaatar

In the north-centre of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, is an area that sits at the ‘cusp’ between two overlapping built environments. These are a core area of apartments and other buildings connected to centrally provided heating and plumbing infrastructure, as well as expansive areas of fenced land plots, colloquially known as the ger districts. The ger districts, now constituting roughly 83% of Ulaanbaatar’s built area (World Bank, 2015: 1), are named after the white collapsible felt dwelling commonly used by Mongolian mobile pastoralists. Ger are often set up in these fenced land plots, and many plots also contain wooden or brick houses or baishin. Notably, ger districts in this extremely cold capital city are not connected to centrally provided heating, water or sewerage. The overlapping cusp between these two areas consists of a mixture of built forms. Here, apartment buildings become fewer, intermingling with land plots and older buildings. Due to their relative proximity to the city centre, and thus also to subterranean infrastructural connections to heat and water, some districts on the cusp between apartments and ger districts have been undergoing forms of redevelopment for several years. In one of these areas sits one of several older two-storey socialist-era dormitory buildings consisting of one-room apartments. These apartments are not connected to running water or sewerage – residents collect water from nearby municipally provided water kiosks at a cost, and access public toilets nearby. These buildings were originally built during the 1950s to house construction workers from China. Since then, many different types of people have bought or rented apartments in these buildings.

One such person is Orgil, an older man who has lived in one of these dormitory apartments for several decades.¹ He originally bought his apartment because he anticipated that it might be redeveloped into a newer building in time. Orgil is more acquainted than most with the nature of the expanding networks of centrally provided heating throughout the city. At the time of research he worked in construction on installing heating componentry in new buildings that formed part of the redevelopment happening around him. His building sits within a downtown zone of Ulaanbaatar that is connected to the District Heating System. Walking with us one day around the base of his building, he described to me and my research assistant how his old building is connected to the main heating supply but that the connection is not good. He makes ongoing repairs to the pipes of his dilapidated building on behalf of his neighbours. Gesturing to the dirt ground surrounding his building – furrowed and uneven after many years of seasonal snow, black ice and thawing – he pointed out to me where he believed newer heating pipes existed below the surface. Tracing invisible lines across the dirt ground around the bases of other buildings, he explained that if only a new building was built in the place of his old one, they could get access to new and improved heating infrastructure hidden underground nearby. Here, Orgil was mapping potential infrastructural possibilities in a city that has considerable inequitable infrastructural provision. In this article, I explore the implications of living in this uncertain infrastructural landscape, a landscape that gives rise to residents putting intense focus on the quality of the material landscape around them.

This article discusses some of the intended and unintended effects of the configurations of Ulaanbaatar’s heating infrastructure. More specifically, it examines how residents negotiate reverberating forms of stigma that are placed upon them due to their association with, or proximity to, the environmental effects of heat generation and/or infrastructural lack. Here I examine the connection between heat generation and forms of resulting environmental stigmatisation. By environmental stigmatisation, I am referring to the ‘negative public perception’ of living in areas producing environmental effects that stem from unequally provided infrastructure (Zhuang et al., 2016: 1323). This type of stigma is diffuse and difficult to locate in specific ways (Link and Phelan, 2013: 24). Residents’ attempts to mitigate forms of building and infrastructural ‘quality’ or chanar (in Mongolian), I argue, form ways of negotiating their position within this stratified landscape as they seek a better future for themselves and their families. Taking Butler’s definition of vulnerability ‘as a relation to a field of objects, forces … that impinge on or affect us in some way’ (Butler, 2016: 25), in this context, not only are bodies vulnerable to forms of air pollution, but also buildings themselves are vulnerable to disrepair. Residents’ assessments of infrastructural and building quality in these contexts move beyond any categorisation of these assessments being a clear ‘resistance’ to infrastructurally determined inequalities and changing material conditions. Instead, taking an ethnographic lens that positions the viewpoint of the city through these residential experiences reveals a reconceptualisation of the city occurring within Ulaanbaatar. This reconceptualisation challenges infrastructurally determined normative assumptions about so-called divides between the city’s main built areas and those who live within them.

One of the coldest capital cities in the world, in the middle of winter Ulaanbaatar can often experience high daily temperatures of −26°C and overnight lows of −40°C. Residents, while extremely used to cold weather in urban and rural contexts alike, rely upon the effective provision of and generation of heat for their homes during the colder months of the year spanning from October to April. Apartment areas in Ulaanbaatar are typically heated through centrally provided heating infrastructure. First in operation in 1959, this system has been slowly expanded and incrementally upgraded. In the ger districts, people heat their homes using iron stoves that have until 2019 been fuelled by raw coal.² Examining access to and generation of heating exposes the ways in which these different areas of the city are inextricably interlinked and impact upon one another. The absence of centrally provided heating infrastructure in the ger districts and the presence of coal fires have resulted in encompassing seasonal air pollution throughout the city (Fukada, 2017a, 2017b; Sorace, 2018). This has also given rise to considerably strong normative assumptions as to how built areas are categorised and expectations as to what ‘working’ infrastructure in Ulaanbaatar should consist of. The construction of new apartments in place of ger district land plots has often been described in official discourse, and in programmes of urban ‘redevelopment’ (dahin tölövlölt), as an avenue to improving Ulaanbaatar’s air quality. Apartments, by being connected to core heating infrastructure, are often viewed as providing insulated refuges away from the material properties of coal smoke – including the smoke’s particulate matter and the effects of this on the lungs and body (Fukada, 2017a). This focus on apartments as a type of panacea to the supposedly infrastructurally ‘incomplete’ger districts has stemmed from and enhanced normative assumptions as to what kinds of urbanisation in Ulaanbaatar are considered more ‘legitimate’, despite ger districts being an older and well-established form of urbanisation in Mongolia (Campi, 2006).

Some of the events of Mongolia’s recent economic history have further accelerated this focus on ‘profit-driven’ urban expansion (cf. Plueckhahn, 2020). Stemming from a period of speculation-driven economic growth that began in 2009 and accompanied vast increases in investment in two key Mongolian mineral deposits – the coal deposit of Tavan Tolgoi, and the copper and gold deposit of Oyu Tolgoi, both located in Mongolia’s Gobi Desert region – Mongolia experienced an increase in foreign direct investment that peaked in 2011 (APIP, 2016: 57). Accompanying this was considerable investment in secondary industries, including construction in Ulaanbaatar, and the city’s urban skyline began to grow with increased construction in residential (both luxury and affordable housing) and commercial properties. It became a space where real estate markets formed an integral part of urban governance as a financially embattled municipality looked to the private sector in order to undertake vast forms of outsourced urban development (Shatkin, 2017). However, once China’s demand for coal lessened, after 2013 Mongolia’s economic growth stalled. During 2015–2016, Ulaanbaatar’s construction industry was experiencing a considerable downturn in investment that resulted in stalled building works or redevelopment plans that failed to come to fruition. Plans were being realigned and residents were engaging in new strategies that adapted to these periods of oscillation. My research during this time highlighted how this type of proliferating ‘speculative urbanism’ (Goldman, 2011), and (in the perspective of my interlocutors) the ‘wild’ (zerleg) capitalism that made it possible, was coming under critique as residents questioned the ethics and feasibility of this type of profit-driven urban form. One way in which they did this was to pay close attention to the material properties of their buildings, speculating on possible infrastructural connections to come and reflecting on the material properties of coal smoke in the air.

This article draws from 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork that spanned 2015–2017, in which I researched how Ulaanbaatar residents attempted to access or maintain ownership of real estate, including apartments and land, during a period of considerable economic flux. It also draws from analysis of relevant reports and media articles that examine the outcomes of initiatives aimed to improve Ulaanbaatar’s centrally provided heating systems and alleviate air pollution. Throughout this research, I learnt how residents aimed to seek good quality heating connections and avoid air pollution when buying property. Considering the presence and impact of inequitable heating infrastructure as a ‘heterogeneous infrastructural configuration’ (Lawhon et al., 2018: 724) shaping people’s experiences of the city, reveals the interlinked nature between heating, wider material environments and atmospheres including air. It also reveals how infrastructural configurations are also implicated within discourses and processes of stigmatisation that stretch beyond one area of the city.

Environmental stigma and infrastructural configurations

Following Brewis and Wutich’s (2018: 1) definition of stigma as the marginalisation of someone because they are associated with something that is ‘classified as unacceptable or undesirable’, I argue that in Ulaanbaatar it is through the association with forms of infrastructural effects, or their lack, that one becomes stigmatised. Environmental stigmatisation in Ulaanbaatar is the stigmatisation of people viewed to be linked to types of actions and practices that are seen as having polluting or adverse environmental effects (Zhuang et al., 2016: 1323). As the material properties of infrastructural configurations in Ulaanbaatar are themselves diffuse and hard to map, this form of stigmatisation is also diffuse, forming part of the wider marginalisation of those living in ger district areas.

Infrastructurally determined environmental stigma reveals an expansion of earlier definitions of territorial stigmatisation as outlined by Wacquant (2007). In Ulaanbaatar, rather than residents being discredited or critiqued for the places with which they are associated (Slater, 2015: 113), there is instead ‘symbolic defamation’ (Slater, 2015) of particular practices with which people are associated that are linked to forms of inequitable infrastructural access and the types of environments that arise from this. This form of environmental stigma is attributed to the very fact that forms of infrastructural lack and corresponding diversification of methods to generate heat (such as burning coal in one’s home) have environmental consequences. These consequences impact upon different parts of the city as a whole, regardless of where one might be living. Inequitable access to the district heating system and the corresponding rise of air pollution expand the theoretical framework of ‘territory’ and its relationship to stigma. The permeating reach of air quality and surrounding atmospheres to different sections of the city results in a reverberating stigmatisation of different groups of people living within these uneven infrastructural landscapes. Ulaanbaatar’s diverse infrastructural configurations implicate the atmospheric quality of air and attempts to seal buildings from coal smoke, coal and artisanal mining and underground pipes. This forms a linking together of these social, municipal and economic ‘for-profit’ spaces (Appel et al., 2018). The frame of infrastructurally determined environmental stigma forms an expansion of the ‘organisation and experience of space itself’ that current configurations of capitalism give rise to (Wacquant, 2007: 69).

This conceptual expansion of a singularly defined ‘territory’ or ‘space’ is significant, especially considering that the ger districts themselves, while sometimes associated with lower socio-economic groups, are a diverse and expansive part of the city. There is much socio-economic variation and differing access to services such as education, health and transport. There is also much variation in the type of built structures people live in, ranging from ger to two-storey built homes housing numerous family members. This socio-economic and material variation is influenced by numerous factors including age, familial support, proximity to roads and transport, topography of land and forms of land tenure (see Byambadorj et al., 2011; Fox, 2019; Miller, 2017; Terbish and Rawsthorne, 2016).

Through its focus on infrastructural plurality and the overlapping, mutual constitution of social and material spheres, as well as on environmental stigma and air and building quality, this article is well poised to contribute to recent developments in the discussion of infrastructure in urban studies more generally. In particular, it builds upon Lawhon et al.’s (2018) approach to infrastructure, where they advocate the paradigm of ‘Heterogeneous Infrastructure Configurations’ (HICs). Thinking through the framework of HICs, they write, ‘helps point to the gaps in our existing approaches to the study of urban infrastructure.’ In particular, it incorporates a consideration of ‘the materiality and extensive and variegated geographies of infrastructure and the dynamism of everyday use’ (Lawhon et al., 2018: 724). Thinking through HICs shifts the focus away from systems ‘developed from outside’ to ‘situated users’ (Lawhon et al., 2018: 726). Importantly, these configurations can incorporate diverse phenomena. Lawhon et al. (2018: 726) note: ‘key here is not to delimit the boundaries of a configuration (which are, surely, fluid), but the examination of different artefacts in relation to each other and social relations.’

Such a focus allows for a synthesis of the porous, changeable and diverse nature of infrastructural configurations. Rather than principally providing an infrastructurally driven examination of the ways that infrastructures ‘shape the ambient conditions of everyday life’ or how a ‘technical system originates in one place, growing in response’ to particular factors or techniques (Larkin, 2013: 330, 336), I instead discuss ways that residents assess the nature of infrastructural amalgamations and their own experiences of living within complex urban environments. Ulaanbaatar residents view infrastructural systems as incomplete, changing and made up of ‘irreducible plurality’ (Harvey, 2012: 77). Additionally, new materialist approaches have emphasised how recent directions in the life and social sciences are viewing material phenomena as ‘increasingly being conceptualised not as discrete entities, or closed systems, but rather as open, complex systems with porous boundaries’ (Coole and Frost, 2010: 15). Such ‘poracity’ of infrastructural boundaries, or topologies, forms a recurrent theme in the recent expansion of the anthropological literature on infrastructure (Anand, 2015; Harvey, 2012).

This analytical focus requires a methodology that stems from developments in the anthropology of urban spaces and urban studies, namely types of ‘mobile ethnography.’ The type of ethnography that underpins this article draws from participant observation that follows people, connections and relationships across space and time (Streule, 2020: 427). Throughout my research, I explored numerous different kinds of ethnographic avenues, including walking with residents through nearby streets, visiting them socially, going with real estate agents to visit newly completed luxury developments, interviewing district officials and reading numerous organisational reports and media articles. As recently and evocatively detailed by Streule (2020), rather than conduct ethnography in particular territorially defined administrative districts or neighbourhoods, such an approach advocates a moving, mobile ethnography that involves ‘diverse perspectives, scales, sites, methods and data’ in order to ‘grasp the complexity of the relational and processual quality of urban territory’ (Streule, 2020: 426).

Residents paid close attention to the quality of their surrounding urban environments. While the political and economic processes underlying infrastructural provision appeared opaque to many, attention was directed towards speculatively assessing material environments. Musings on infrastructure were largely framed through assessments of quality – the quality of pipes and of buildings to which heating was connected and the types of heating quality such buildings allowed. People balanced their assessments of building quality, and its place within Ulaanbaatar’s infrastructural landscape, along with the quality of life they might experience when making a certain apartment their home. Here, I synthesise the above theoretical approaches towards materiality and infrastructure with the anthropology of assessments of quality – a strand of literature most recently seen in the work of anthropologist Harkness (2013, 2015). I focus on the way people assess the following two phenomena outlined by Harkness: quality, being the ‘abstract, attributional categories of qualitative experience (e.g. softness), and qualia, the ‘actual instantiations of sensuous quality, such as the soft give of a pillow’ (Harkness, 2013: 15). Making decisions around property results in people paying close attention to different kinds of visual and atmospheric signs of infrastructural possibility, infrastructural lack or potential. Here, qualia become types of ‘indexes’ that ‘materialise phenomenally in human activity’ that can be ‘reflexively taken to be sensuous instances of abstract qualities’ including stink, warmth, hardness and straightness (Harkness, 2015: 574). Significantly, assessments of quality and qualia become motivations for types of social action and shape how such action is perceived – forming practices that are shaped by material affordances and limits (Harkness, 2015: 574).

Considering infrastructurally determined environmental stigma arising out of heat generation allows an examination of the processes occurring from within the city itself, and the ways in which residents perceive what the urban is becoming in Ulaanbaatar (Reddy, 2018: 537). It brings to this Special Issue a focus on the affective presence of air pollution, emphasising the interplay between material networks of the city and the stigma that exacerbates forms of exclusion. The focus on the changeability of the material nature of the city and the interplay between different elements also highlights the potential agency of the material, including decay and pollution, in contributing to forms of stigma that can have personal, reverberating effects. Attempting to seek out the quality of the surrounding landscape doesn't only become a way to negotiate types of stigmatisation occurring within this changing urban configuration. As this article will now demonstrate, it reveals a reconceptualisation of the city away from the normative assumption of a clear divide between ger district areas and apartment areas of the city. It also demonstrates a way in which focusing on quality allows residents to perceive different futures within this changing landscape.

Heat in Ulaanbaatar: Coal and its antitheses

Heat – its effectiveness and the effects of or limitations to its production and effective provision – forms one of the most important infrastructural factors that shape the built forms and experiences of Ulaanbaatar. Buildings in the central area of Ulaanbaatar are supported by a district heating system (DHS) that, when first constructed, was warmed by hot water produced at three combined heat and power plants (ADB, 2008: 1; Boldbaatar et al., 2014: 140), indicated by the ubiquitous presence of large beige above-ground pipes that run through sections of the city. This system was first introduced in 1959, forming a type of infrastructural ‘bundling’ occurring during the socialist period that saw the city’s heating system and the production of electricity become inextricably materially interlinked in ‘intransigent’ ways (Collier, 2011) into the one centralised (tövlörsön) thermal energy system (Boldbaatar et al., 2014: 140). Like other areas throughout parts of the Soviet Union (Collier, 2011), Ulaanbaatar’s district heating system represented a material manifestation of a ‘kernel’ of Soviet ideology: the ideology of communality, manifesting in an interlinked, bundled system that radiates out from an urban core and which is heavily inter-reliant on its component parts (Humphrey, 2005: 43).

This centrally provided heating infrastructure is not provided to the majority of Ulaanbaatar’s ger districts. Until October 2019, residents predominantly heated their homes through burning raw coal in iron stoves. Raw coal was predominantly sourced from artisanal coal mine shafts sunk in the now (officially) closed coal mine near Nalaih, a satellite town to the east of Ulaanbaatar, as well as coal deposits near Baganuur, a satellite town further east. For a long time, raw coal has formed the main significant fuel source for the majority of Ulaanbaatar’s inhabitants. Following the end of socialism in 1990, Ulaanbaatar has experienced a vast increase in population (Terbish and Rawsthorne, 2016). As the urban population has grown, Ulaanbaatar has seen a corresponding increase in severe winter coal-smoke air pollution since the late 1990s and early 2000s (Fukada, 2017b), as coal smoke becomes routinely trapped over the city, hemmed in by the mountains surrounding it (Sorace, 2018).

While the permeable nature of the surrounding air and atmosphere of this urban landscape gives the sense that air quality such as this is ‘immaterial’ (in contrast to the material makeup of the city itself), this air pollution has had considerable material consequences. As noted by anthropologist Chisato Fukada, ‘air pollution was a product of slow accretion’ (Fukada, 2017a: 3). Studying the politics of air pollution during the mid-2010s, Fukada’s (2017a: 3) interlocutors are noted as saying that ‘the smoke tricks you. It sneaks in and soot settles here and there.’ White canvas coverings of ger slowly turned grey and similar stains, described as utaany torgog, or ‘smog stains’, appeared on curtains – residents suspected them of having built up over years as smog seeped in through draughts and cracks along windows (Fukada, 2017a: 3) – and pungent odours of smog lingered on clothes and hair. Bodies too were monitored for signs of effects of smog and the particulate matter contained therein, with residents sensing subtle changes in their bodies ‘such as coughs, headaches, sniffles … and swollen throats’ (Fukada, 2017a: 4). A World Bank study in 2011 confirmed these incremental residential mappings of smog effects, and in 2016 the Air Quality Index (AQI) ‘regularly read over 1500, which is considered “beyond index”’ (Fukada, 2017a: 4–5).

In order to address two main factors – an expansive area of the city not connected to core infrastructure and increasing coal smoke pollution that has affected the city at large – some predominant solutions to Ulaanbaatar’s air pollution have been proposed and put in place. One such solution listed in the Master Plan 2020 (Ulaanbaatar Municipality, 2014) that significantly shaped municipal initiatives in the early 2010s was the ger area redevelopment programme. This programme mainly consisted of the privately outsourced construction of apartments that were subsequently connected to core heating and water infrastructure. Underlying this approach is an understanding that apartments are a type of antithesis to ger districts and air pollution, forming a way to build up the city and improve air quality by incrementally reducing coal-smoke stoves. This municipal programme outsourced land acquisition, and the provision of compensation to land holders, to construction companies themselves. It has since been put on hold. Numerous developments failed to be completed and discrepancies over amounts that land holders were compensated and the equitability of land acquisition have come under scrutiny (Amnesty International, 2016). The Master Plan 2020 also advocates for the diversification of infrastructural solutions, acknowledging the need the a tiered heating system implemented in four zoned supply areas spanning the city (Ulaanbaatar Municipality, 2014: 19). This planned tiered system includes a central heating system, a partially central system or a combination of both systems. Included in this is centrally provided heat through the District Heating System (DHS) as well as heat-only boilers, some of which may be ‘independently supplied’ (Ulaanbaatar Municipality, 2014: 19).

Implicit in such a framework, whereby apartments are replacing gers and self-built houses on plots of land, whether overtly intended or not, is the assumption that it is the ger itself and its own stove that is solely to blame for the air pollution effects. Such a perspective is a broad conceptual sweep that presents a simplified portrayal of what is in reality a set of diverse, interconnected urban environments affected by histories of land tenure reforms and political shifts (Sorace, 2018). The sweeping nature of this perception allows for indirect processes of stigmatisation of those linked to the generation of air pollution and forms of infrastructural lack (Link and Phelan, 2013: 24). The normative assumptions that conceptually divide the city between an urban core connected to infrastructure and expansive ger district areas that are not, give rise to persistent stereotyping of those in both areas. The attributes applied to those living in each main ‘area’ can be contradictory – one can be proud of living in one of the areas, and then conversely teased for doing so at the same time. People growing up in apartments can sometimes be labelled as ‘soft’ and privileged. Those growing up in the ger districts are often subject to derogatory discourse that accuses them of being more uncouth or uncultured. The fact that many ger district residents have either arrived from the countryside or have strong links to those that do links up these stereotypes of ger district residents to the (inaccurate) stereotypes of hödöönii hümüüs or ‘countryside people’ as not being well adapted or suited to ‘cosmopolitan’ urban spaces (Sneath, 2006). However, there is also the presence of valorisation for the same countryside associations. The countryside is often exalted as something linked to a quintessential essentialised nomadism (Sneath, 2006). Similarly, ger district residents are often described as tough and resilient.

Delving into the realities of the porous nature of buildings and the reality of expanding a socialist-era heating system reveals that these two built environments are not as clearly defined as these normative assumptions make them out to be. Some people living in the ger districts prefer to do so and are materially quite well off (cf. Byambadorj et al., 2011). Living on a block of land allows one to create opportunities not available when living in an apartment – to grow vegetables to sell or to run a vehicle repair business. The ‘centrally supplied’ system of heating provision to buildings in the city’s core areas is itself extremely diverse following incremental ‘unbundling’ at the end of the socialist era (see also Collier, 2011). As noted by the Asian Development Bank, ‘in operating the DHS, the Ulaanbaatar District Heating Company acts as a heat wholesaler, buying heat from power plants and selling it in bulk to large industrial, commercial and institutional building operators’ (ADB, 2012: 3). Since 2012, the DHS has been made up of an increasingly diverse array of public/private partnerships. It includes four generating companies in addition to the Ulaanbaatar District Heating Company (UDHC), where the UDHC serves a number of private city housing companies (World Bank, 2019: 4). Since 1990, the DHS has undergone significant deterioration (ADB, 2012: 1; ESMAP, 2019; World Bank, 2019: 4), coupled with the inadequate supply to new buildings (ESMAP, 2019: 9; World Bank, 2019: 6). Several large-scale projects funded by a number of bilateral and multilateral organisations since the late 1990s have focused on addressing this deterioration. For example, a large-scale project instigated by loans provided by the Asian Development Bank in 1998 contributed to the maintenance, improvement and extension of the distribution pipe network and the installation of substation heat exchanger units (ADB, 2012: 2). A new project announced by the World Bank plans to contribute to replacing deteriorating pipe networks as well as to improving heating transmission and supply (World Bank, 2019: 5–6).

These attempts to upgrade the District Heating Service reveal it to be made up of a diverse amalgamation of different components that are in varying states of repair and disrepair. Indeed, the types of strategies outlined in the city Master Plan 2020 also acknowledge the need for infrastructural plurality in order to meet the complex heating needs throughout the city. Heating infrastructures are incomplete, and some apartment areas are dilapidated and have ineffective heating. When making and marketing new apartment complexes, quality becomes an important signifier that indicates not only the quality of the building being advertised but the integrity of a building’s place within a larger, diffuse infrastructural network. A new development becomes a material manifestation of a promise – of a space of safety within these diverse infrastructural configurations obtainable to those who can afford it.

Manifesting quality

Since the rise in the construction of residential housing between 2012 and 2014 in Ulaanbaatar (National Statistics Office, 2019), there have been corresponding issues with some new high-rise apartments not being supplied with enough adequate heating, where ‘vast construction and increase in heat demand are posing significant challenges to the DHS network due to … limited capacity’ for effective heat transmission (World Bank, 2019: 6). This has resulted in some residents who wish to buy property being quite sceptical as to whether new buildings are heated adequately. Overall, such heating discrepancies contribute to a drive to seek ‘quality’ when purchasing housing, with quality most often being described as an apartment which is adequately warm during winter. This focus on the quality of infrastructural connectivity in order to reassure a sceptical clientele has formed a focus within Ulaanbaatar’s high-end real estate market.

One afternoon in the summer of 2016, I drove out with Tsogoo, a real estate agent, to see apartments in a brand new development that he had been hired to sell called Haven Town.³ This development formed part of a district that lay some considerable distance away from the core of Ulaanbaatar. We headed down a dusty, unpaved road that bordered several new luxury apartment complexes that are indicative of the kinds of developments in this area. We pulled up in an alcove alongside a temporary fence that lay under the shadow of a new building with clean lines and new paintwork that arched out above us into the clear summer sky. The construction of Haven Town was nearing completion. Entering by the large glass doors at the main doorway of the first building, we came into a new lobby; some electrical wires still dangled from light fixtures and temporary foam padding was still affixed around door frames.

What the developers were aiming to sell in Haven Town was not just a luxury building that catered to the cosmopolitan aspirations of a global Ulaanbaatar elite. A section of the Haven Town brochure boasted the building’s ‘lifetime guarantee’ of quality. This section included several key points, including that the building was fully connected to the central engineering grid (including heating and water) and that it had a 40- to 60-year guarantee of quality building construction. These claims to quality, rather than simply relating to the structural integrity of the building, extended from the core of the building itself and spanned outwards into a larger infrastructural network. The quality of the development’s infrastructural connections to the rest of the city (its connections to electricity and centrally provided heating) were something to assure a potential buyer of – they were not something that potential customers would necessarily take as a given. The advertising appealed to a clientele that valued, assessed and sought out multifaceted aspects of material ‘quality.’ This building would be seen not only as a discrete entity but also as a stake in an interconnected and variable urban infrastructural configuration.

Tsogoo proceeded to take me through the features of the apartment. He described how the doors, tiles, radiators and other heating componentry had all been imported from different European countries. Such quality, he explained, was evidenced through such markers as an embossed metal seal embedded in a doorframe in order to prove its brand authenticity. Tsogoo encouraged me to sense the different qualia hidden in plain sight as instantiations of this building’s quality (Harkness, 2015). He showed me the shininess of metal heating componentry hidden away in a cupboard, commenting on how parts made by expensive European brands would mean they would not easily corrode. Such configurations of quality are very much the purview of the wealthy in Ulaanbaatar. Those living in this area, while potentially affected by air pollution that may reach them, were not subject to the stigmatising discourses of those more closely affected by infrastructural lack or attributed with producing the effects of unequal infrastructural access. Instead, seeking quality such as this points to the way that power relations are implicitly embedded in flows of capital and markers of economic success (Appel et al., 2018: 4), shaping the way stigmatising discourse is placed on those associated with the unintended effects of infrastructural inequality.

However, this seeking of quality and the types of normative assumptions into which it is implicitly interwoven, while possibly resulting in someone buying a suitable, well-connected apartment, are also aspirational. Residents living among incremental upgrades too often engage in speculation as they anticipate types of possible infrastructural expansions. However, like the pipes being provided to new buildings, this infrastructural expansion sometimes does not occur or ‘never fully (or only) [does] what it says it will do’ (Simone, 2015: 155). As the next example shows, the political, municipal processes behind making core DHS infrastructure accessible are viewed as being opaque and unpredictable. In the gap between a perceived possible connection and the stark reality of its absence, residents negotiate these interstices and their material consequences.

‘Flowing with the current’

In the Ulaanbaatar district in which Orgil lives, on the cusp between the built city core and expansive ger districts, a redevelopment plan had been made to redevelop nearby similar socialist-era dormitories into new apartments. However, unlike the redevelopment in the area at which Orgil worked, this planned redevelopment did not go ahead. The near implementation of such urban improvement so close to Orgil’s building had contributed to heightened expectations among residents of the area that new apartments would be built in the vicinity. This was significant, as like others in the area, Orgil’s building was not connected to running water and was suffering severe dilapidation. Mapping possible future connections became a way to negotiate the physical material landscape around him.

Orgil’s building was particularly susceptible to the permeating effects of air pollution. His socialist-era apartment had severely deteriorated. ‘Our building has putrefied in a way’, he said; ‘when you close the door, the walls tremble.’ The walls of this 1950s building had been constructed to include a wooden lattice frame reinforced with concrete and plaster. The inadequate winter heating had resulted in the building being quite damp. Orgil said that the building itself was also quite permeable. The windows did not seal properly anymore, and cracks in the walls meant that ‘the building is full of draughts.’ The building was becoming increasingly porous as it aged. He described how, since the building was so close to the ger districts, coal smoke often made its way into the building overnight, making the air quality problematic. Following such material markers as the smokiness of the air or the flimsiness of a door became part of the ‘feeling of doing’ through which Orgil traced different qualia (Harkness, 2015: 574), as a way of knowing changes in his environment over time. These material conditions further impinged on and affected residents like Orgil, forming a manifestation of the concomitant vulnerability of the buildings and the residents living within them to the effects of air pollution and dampness (Butler, 2016: 13, 25).

In order to move beyond this status quo, anticipation of speculative future developments in the area and avenues through which to pursue them became ways in which Orgil mobilised forms of speculation-driven conceptual resistance. Such speculations moved him beyond this environment of interlaced vulnerabilities (Butler, 2016: 13). Orgil described how a prominent official had held a public meeting in the district and had urged them all to ‘find construction companies themselves’ to redevelop their building. This type of extremely privatised outsourced redevelopment processes was typical during this period following the period of speculation-driven economic growth and revealed a type of attempted outsourcing of urban redevelopment, even to residents themselves. As Orgil emphasised to me, ‘the main heating line passes in front of us, and right behind this building. The central thermal route passes in a less than 6m distance.’ He envisaged that a 16-storey building could be constructed in its place with business and service centres located on the first floors. Twenty families from the surrounding areas could be housed in the building, and the construction company could sell the rest of the apartments to make a profit. He said, ‘everyone [in this area] is waiting for such a company’ to do this kind of work. However, he noted that only those with the correct political and business connections could initiate such a process. He described, on the one hand, the need for residents to be alert, or sergelen, to astutely assess whether particular measures of urban improvement might be effective for them. However, in the meantime as residents waited for an as yet unforeseen redevelopment project, he described the need to ‘flow with the [river] current.’

The interstice created between attempting to instigate change while navigating infrastructural precarity formed a space of waiting, and ‘flowing with the current’ formed a way for Orgil to negotiate living among the changeable, deteriorating material conditions around him that implicated the intimate space of his home. His careful attention formed a type of ‘material literalism’ (Lea and Pholeros, 2010) that produced a space in which the larger political status quo could be reflected upon. Noting the quality of infrastructure around him and the need for its improvement, and hoping that a future redevelopment plan might emerge, formed ways in which Orgil conceptually moved beyond the porousness of his building, the effects of air pollution and possible further deterioration. ‘Flowing with the current’ required some degree of acceptance; it was also a way of waiting until he could effectively intersect a variegated and expanding infrastructural system through attaining an apartment in a newly developed building, and until the promise of such infrastructural configurations might materialise.

Conclusion

Looking through the lens of wide-scale and diverse infrastructural configurations and some of their intended and unintended effects has revealed the ways in which Ulaanbaatar’s two main areas of buildings and expansive ger districts are interlinked – both discursively and through the presence and absence of infrastructures. Rather than solely being two ‘separate’ areas, they are examples of different urban substantiations that are inextricably ‘entangled’ (Srivastava, 2015). One way in which this is illuminated is through looking at Ulaanbaatar through the frame of environmental stigma, a frame that allows a consideration of how people become stigmatised due to their association with infrastructural inequalities and their unintended effects.

Those associated with infrastructural lack, or attributed with contributing to forms of air pollution through the burning of coal, become stigmatised due to their association with the negative effects of these plural, divergent infrastructural configurations. This form of stigmatisation affects a broad and diverse group of urban inhabitants spread across multiple districts of the city. It moves beyond a territorialised understanding of stigma, to include diverse practices that are stigmatised on many scales throughout an interconnected urban configuration. The frame of ‘environmental stigma’ moves beyond an examination of ‘local moral worlds’ (Brewis and Wutich, 2018: 1). It requires an encapsulation of socio-cultural discursive practices, but at the same time a consideration of the minutiae of variegated urban material elements that make up these divergent spaces, elements that are under constant change – through either the combining of new materials to make a newly constructed apartment building, or the slow deterioration of buildings built many decades earlier under very different material and political circumstances.

Such stigmatising can be subtle, diffuse and not easily attributable with deriving from one particular group. This means that the processes of stigmatisation can remain entrenched and pervasive, and reflective of wider power relationships (Link and Phelan, 2013), relationships that shape the main priorities of urban development. These processes of stigmatisation produce normative assumptions that Ulaanbaatar is a ‘divided’ city, placing responsibilities onto its inhabitants for the effects of infrastructural inequalities. Such discourses do not necessarily take into account other factors contributing to Ulaanbaatar’s air pollution, including a recent post-socialist history of unfolding urban land privatisation, freedom of movement (Sorace, 2018), and, most significantly, an inequitable provision of core infrastructure.

Residents attempt to cultivate or seek out forms of quality by paying close attention to the minutiae of different ‘qualia’, the sensuous instantiations of forms of ‘quality’ (Harkness, 2013: 15). This becomes a way in which one can reverse a type of stigmatising gaze, to look to the urban environment itself in order to find new ways of reconfiguring different kinds of infrastructural opportunities. Whether asking a possible client to appreciate intricate examples of ‘proof’ of an apartment’s luxurious quality, or noticing whether doors were adequately protecting an old building from the incremental effects of seeping coal smoke, people are attempting to understand their environment and speculate on what next step to take.

Such a focus on quality allows an expansion of understandings of ‘resistance that emerges in opposition to failing infrastructure’ (Butler, 2016: 12). Incremental forms of responsibility are taken on by residents as a way of slowly negotiating their current landscape and speculating on new opportunities. This can be seen in Orgil’s careful attention to the nature of his building and speculative mapping of hidden subterranean environments and the potential heating pipes they may contain. This forms part of his anticipation of future urban improvement. It can be seen in the way he engaged with anticipatory expectations of future redevelopment possibilities, narratives of which circulated among residents in the district. Understanding, however, that this is not a straightforward process, he emphasised the need in the meantime to ‘flow with the current.’ This attention to infrastructural and building quality forms ways of articulating and understanding Ulaanbaatar’s present urban condition, providing a way in which to reconceptualise urban space away from normative assumptions. Here, spaces of dilapidation become spaces of potential opportunity.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank colleagues in the Anthropology and Development Studies Programs at the University of Melbourne for providing feedback on an earlier draft. I would also like to thank B. Doljinsuren for assistance with this research.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: Research for this article was funded by the European Research Council, ERC-2013-CoG, 615785, Emerging Subjects. I have written this article while undertaking the McArthur Research Fellowship in Anthropology at the University of Melbourne.

ORCID iD

Rebekah Plueckhahn

Notes

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