The Digital Underground: Public Life Beneath the Streets of Bucharest, Romania

Abstract

Much has been written about the public life of cities, almost all of which is grounded in observations taken from the square and the sidewalk. Yet across Europe, Asia, and the Americas, environmental, demographic, and economic pressures have prompted cities to invest in new and expanded underground spaces, such as subterranean Metro systems, pedestrian passageways, and the basement levels of buildings where apartments, offices, cafes, bars and restaurants, supermarkets and shops, for example, are now found. Romania's capital city, Bucharest, is one case in point. As the city's planners ask its residents to move increasingly off of the boulevard and to relate to the city from beneath its main squares, this essay asks a basic question that has received surprisingly little analytical attention: what kind of public life does the urban underground make possible? Ethnographically, this essay takes as its point of departure a prominent advertisement campaign called, "The Digital Public Library" (DPL), which was first installed with civically minded intentions in a major Bucharest Metro station in 2012. The campaign then evolved, through various iterations, for years to come. This essay engages the Digital Public Library—its placement beneath the city as much as its civically minded aims and successes—historically and ethnographically to argue, ultimately, that the expansion of underground urbanism opens up an added and concerning dimension to the privatization and class separation that has threatened the character of urban public life in recent decades.