VOLKOVA, DARIA

1) Why are you researching or studying at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar?         

Bauhaus-Universität Weimar is a great fit for my topic. As I explore housing infrastructures and their maintenance, I find the multidisciplinary background of colleagues from the Institute for European Urban Studies (IfEU) particularly helpful. Even though there is a word "European" in the title, many of my colleagues, including me, are researching very different spaces which go far beyond Europe.        

2) What is special about your project? Why is it relevant?

I am researching a situation that, for many in the Global North, may seem exceptional: housing infrastructures in Aktau that break a lot. Aktau is a special city in Kazakhstan built in Soviet times, and the history of its infrastructure is also peculiar. For example, the fresh water supply comes from the desalination of the Caspian Sea waters. The pipes, the wiring, the sewage, and the built structures were not centrally updated for many decades, and the power and desalination plant have also reached their capacity. Every day in the city, there is a breakage, a leakage, a malfunction somewhere in the housing infrastructure.

Yet for many, this situation is nowhere near extraordinary. For many citizens in the Global South and Global East, it is the everyday reality. With the environmental crisis and increasing global water scarcity, a constantly increasing number of cities inside and beyond the Global North will experience the same situation of brokenness. In my work, I am explaining why infrastructures like this exist and why maintenance practices sustain their precarious condition over time.