Segmenting the city: McDonald’s, the Metro, and the mobilization of the middle classes underground

Abstract

Following Romania’s accession into the European Union (EU) in 2007, a wave of foreign direct investment quickly transformed its capital city, Bucharest, into a global leader in business services. With this new economy came new middle classes whose turn toward auto-mobility materially overwhelmed the city center. To preserve the quality and character of the city, urban planners and bureaucrats proposed to “mobilize” the middle classes underground by incorporating global brands, such as McDonald’s, inside Metro stations. This essay details these ongoing efforts to segment vertically the city above from the city belowground, professional elites from the middle classes, through an analysis of the staged materiality of two McDonald’s restaurants located one beneath the other. How and to what effect, this essay asks, is the urban underground staged to mobilize the middle classes? This is a historical and ethnographic line of inquiry taken from Bucharest that resonates with cities the world over, where the demands of development have pushed cities not just upwards into the sky, and outwards toward the periphery, but also deep underground in ways that vertically segment the experience of urban life.