Flowing Progress: Transforming the Danube Through Infrastructure

Authors

Stefan Dorondel, Francisc I. Rainer Institute of Anthropology Bucharest and the Institute for South-East European Studies of the Romanian Academy
Luminita Gatejel, Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies

Files

Description

Flowing Progress: Transforming the Danube Through Infrastructure focuses on how different political regimes and forms of governance have imagined and technologically transformed the most international river in the world. Multidisciplinary and drawing on methodologies of history, anthropology of infrastructure, and science, technology, and society, this collection explores the tensions between the river and its natural pulses, the humans that populate its floodplains, state agencies, and infrastructure. The book engages the concept of disturbance to point out the circular and spiraling dynamics between hydrological processes and technopolitical and economic practices. Disturbance denotes a specific type of long-term dynamic between human attempts to control the Danube, the material systems they implemented to achieve these goals, and the agency of the river that both enabled the functioning of infrastructure and the breakdown of such arrangements. It draws particular attention to the concerted efforts to contain and optimize the Danube’s flow, adding layer after layer of dams, channels, and pipes that could potentially escalate the power of a leashed river. Taking a longer historical perspective from the sixteenth century until today, the volume provides a variety of relevant case studies and local contexts in the Ottoman and Habsburg empires, and their successor states Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, and Serbia which show different ways of how humans have imagined and coped with this mighty river.

ISBN

9781626711198

Publication Date

Summer 8-15-2025

Publisher

Purdue University Press

City

West Lafayette

Keywords

Danube River history, infrastructure, river technology, history of naval transportation, floods, mitigating floods, history of Danube riparian population, socialism and postsocialism, river management, river governance, transforming the Danube, fluvial islands, biodiversity, dam

Disciplines

European History | Geography | History | Political Science

Comments

Open access publication of this title is supported by Purdue University Libraries and School of Information Studies.

Recommended Citation

Dorondel, Stefan and Gatejel, Luminita, "Flowing Progress: Transforming the Danube Through Infrastructure" (2025). Central European Studies. 11.
https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/ces/11