CoMoDe

Published by the Berliner Gazette on the 11th of November 2024

In “Governing ‘Green’ Public Infrastructure: The Trolleybus Case in Bishkek,” Bermet Borubaeva and Egor Muleev take us on a ride through the tangled wires of Bishkek’s trolleybus saga—a tale of sustainability, bureaucracy, and a city at a crossroads. At the heart of the drama is Bishkek’s trolleybus system, the capital’s only electric public transport with enough capacity to avoid daily gridlock, yet it’s on the brink of extinction. City Hall, nudged by foreign consultants and seduced by shiny new e-buses, wants to ditch the old for the new—even though the old is green, functional, and beloved by the people. What follows is a classic case of public infrastructure caught in the gears of bureaucracy, where short-term decisions and backroom deals hold more weight than long-term planning.

The article further explores the role of local governance, workers’ struggles, and grassroots resistance in shaping the future of public infrastructure, using the trolleybus as a case study for broader issues in urban mobility and democratic accountability.

Read the whole article here.

The October 2024 issue of Technology and Culture is officially out and with that, a fresh review on the recently published “If Cars Could Walk: Postsocialist Streets in Transformation” ed. by Ger Duijzings and Tauri Tuvikene” by Lyubomir Pozharliev, part of the CoMoDe research group, has been published.

Read an excerpt of the review & get access here: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/940504

We are happy to share that Prof. Waldemar Kuligowski will be joining us as a keynote speaker at the t2m Annual Conference in Leipzig in 2024. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on the intersection of mobility, sustainability, and digitalization. His research interests focus on the theory of culture, reflexive ethnography, anthropology of motorway, festivals and festivalization.

Recently he published Modernizing Localities in Poland: A Never-ending Transformation (Lanham – London – New York 2024) and (with Marcin Poprawski) Festivals and Values. Music, Community Engagement and Organisational Symbolism (Cham 2023). A selection of his critical essays in Serbian under the title “Polish Christ and Serbian Trumpets” is being prepared. As a “public intellectual”, he publishes his essays and articles in leading Polish newspapers and magazines. Recently he has been involved in organizing scientific conferences in a jazz club and at a punk rock music festival.