Tides of Concrete: Sensing Infrastructural Times in a Former Socialist Model City

This is an episodic sensorial biography (Desjarlais 2003) of a city made of concrete. It recounts how urban modernist infrastructures, shaped by their main construction material, created a new historical-sensorial experience. It tracks an infrastructural intimacy, whose cracks, tremors and concussions mark epochal changes in what – for want of a more precise term – others have coined “infrastructural times:” the similarly intricate relations between specific infrastructures and the times in which they exist (Barry 2015; Anand et al. 2018; Appel 2018; Joniak-Lüthi 2019). The maritime metaphors deployed below are not intended to naturalize these dramatic changes. Rather, they introduce a different temporal context to this infrastructure’s precarious materiality in order to disturb our own sense of time