Maria Șalaru is Housing Retrofit Strategy Coordinator at Lewisham Council in London and Honorary Lecturer in Anthropology at University College London. Her work focuses on the anthropology of the built environment, infrastructure, and climate adaptation. She is the author of An Anthropology of Architectural Transformation: The Changing Fabric of a Romanian Block of Flats (UCL Press, 2025) and the award-winning observational documentary The Block. Her current research explores housing retrofit in the United Kingdom as a form of infrastructural care, examining how climate policy and everyday life intersect in high-rise social housing.
Posts by This Author
Retrofitting
Retrofitting, in its very name, carries a contradiction. The prefix, “retro,” signals a backward glance—an engagement with what has already been built—while “fi... More
Unbuilding: Introduction
Confronted with the crumbling legacy of twentieth-century infrastructures, the toxic effects of extractive and manufacturing industries, and the shadow futures ... More
Unbuilding
Confronting the entangled legacies of failed infrastructures, toxic materials, and compromised futures, this series opens up the concept of unbuilding as a crit... More