Urbanites and Reforms in the Housing and Utility Sector: Networks of Resistance

Abstract

The article employs three ANT (actor-network theory) categories – scripts, antiprogramms and networks – and discusses technological reforms in the Russian housing and utility sector. It analyzes the strategies that users employ to change and correct water, heat, and electricity meter readings. Its goal is to show the ways in which consumers and their practices of manipulating technological gadgets, usually omitted from research analyses, may infl uence the functioning of urban infrastructural networks and the federal technological policy in a broad sense.