Inhabiting Otherness - Iiris Toom

Pilot Thesis

INHABITING OTHERNESS Russian minority memory and spatial appropriation in the post-Soviet housing district of Lasnamäe, Tallinn

Iiris Tähti Toom | Christ’s college | University of Cambridge Research Supervisor: Dr Max Sternberg Design Tutors: James Pockson, Aram Mooradian A design thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the MPhil in Architectural and Urban Design, March 2021 Word Count: 4909

ABSTRACT This essay examines the post-Soviet panel housing district of Lasnamäe in Tallinn, Estonia, as a site of contested cultural production for its predominantly Russian-speaking minority residents. Delving into processes of memory politics and informal spatial use, the research aims to illuminate minority experiences of post-Soviet daily domesticity, framing the resultant identities and spatial appropriation practices in the context of 1990s property restitution and the sweeping privatisation of ‘public’ space.

CONTENTS 7 Introduction 9

Literature Review

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Formal Memory Culture

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Development of Mass Housing Districts

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Restitution and Dispossession

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Case Study: Lasnamäe

25 Methods 27 Conclusion 29 Bibliography 33

Image References

Figure 2: Lasnamäe as constructed, 1976

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INTRODUCTION After the three decades of independence, with post-socialism soon outliving socialism itself, it is apt time to take stock of developments in the “burdened landscapes” it left behind (Colomb, 2007). Numerous accounts describe the entanglement of cultural politics and urban space in Soviet construction projects, but in much of the literature these landscapes are depicted as anachronistic communist curiosities or cultural deadweight for the postSoviet states they now inhabit. This is particularly prevalent in the case of housing districts, often portrayed as ubiquitous vestiges, an urbanistic or aesthetic problem to be solved.

The presentation of these socialist structures as culturally homogenous and simply vestigial neglects the true cultural complexity they present as foremost sites of contestation between local inhabitants’ domestic memories and official state-imposed identities and displays of nationhood. As Light (2019) notes: “Like national identity itself, efforts to fix that identity in the built environment are a fluid, ongoing and contested process” by no means complete.

Arguing that they remain highly relevant as sites of cultural production, this essay seeks to revise architectural discourse around the subject of post-Soviet housing districts. Using Tallinn’s largest and latest district of Lasnamäe to narrate the nation’s change from socialist to post-socialist, the essay explores the ‘left over’ spaces and Russian-speaking* populations of Soviet housing districts in their post-Soviet fates. Focussing on the divergent minority memory of these communities, intergenerational spatial practices and appropriation of privatised ‘public’ landscapes are explored to uncover domestic memory of property restitution and dispossession upon Estonia’s re-independence from the USSR. To situate issues of informal spatial practices and minority memory, it is imperative to grasp the formal processes of official state memory, mass housing construction and property restitution as they pertain to the period of Estonian re-independence from the USSR. The pilot thesis will follow the development of these themes in their respective chapters, exploring their socio-spatial consequences on site in the case study chapter. Mixed methods are then proposed to examine how Lasnamäe’s residents interact with the physical and memorial landscapes they inhabit.

* ‘Russian-speaking’ and ‘Estonian-speaking’ are used as common self-identified terms to refer to ethnic groups speaking Russian or Estonian respectively as their first language, regardless of formal citizenship or national identity.

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LITERATURE REVIEW Despite the relative abundance of literature on Estonian post-soviet urbanism (Stanilov, 2007), memory (Jõesalu, 2017), and the emergent discourse at the intersections of the two (Tammaru, Baldwin, Hess), most accounts have limited themselves to official state narratives from the perspective of the new nations’ ethnic majority, previously suppressed under Soviet rule. While the newly marginalised minorities’ practices and experiences of post-Soviet domesticity have proven fertile ground for anthropologists and ethnographers (Shevchenko 2009; Morris 2016; Boym 1994), these topics are largely disregarded in architectural discourse, where post-socialist housing districts continue to be painted as anachronistic relics of an undesired past. This neglects their continued – if not heightened – relevance as sites of cultural production and memory work for the often-marginalised Russian-speaking minorities that inhabit them. The research at hand thus aims to draw on a range of disciplines from ethnography to urban planning, from memory studies to property reform, to inform a sensitive approach to minority domestic memory and spatial appropriation. Core texts from broader post-Soviet contexts establish underlying commonalities, while literature specific to the 21st century Estonian memoryscape and restitution process ground the research both temporally and geographically. These writings are bolstered by the anthropological literature on post-Soviet domesticity in Russia, exploring similar themes and methodologies, albeit in a cultural context notably different from that of Estonia.

POST-SOVIET URBANISM ‘The Post-Socialist City: Urban Form and Space Transformations in Central and Eastern Europe after Socialism’ by Stanilov (ed) (2007) provides a technical overview of spatial transformations and strategic urban challenges arising from the socio-economic reforms of post-Soviet independence across Central and Eastern Europe. While this work is of limited use in addressing questions of identity and culture, it provides a rich contextual analysis of broader trends in realms of post-socialist urbanity and policy. The broad theoretical backbone of issues relating to mass housing districts and their evolving spatial and demographic condition of will be formed by Baldwin, Hess and Tammaru’s ‘Housing Estates in the Baltic Countries: The Legacy of Central Planning in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania’. Focusing on Baltic peculiarities within the broader context of Soviet central planning, the work offers insight into the evolution of socialist housing from Tallinn’s utopian forest suburbs to its dystopian Lasnamäe district, highlighting the architectural choices

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that shape contemporary segregation and stigma. Despite the essays’ emphasis of ethnic segregation between Estonian- and Russian-speaking populations, Housing Estates in the Baltic Countries does not explore the role of these districts in the ethnic groups’ identity formation or memory politics, neglecting these factors’ pivotal role in wider sociocultural changes.

PROPERTY RESTITUTION Feldman’s (1999) ‘Justice in Space? The restitution of property rights in Tallinn, Estonia’ lends an insight into the conflict-laden process of residential property restitution upon Estonian re-independence in 1991. Questioning whether the return of property to its owners prior to the Soviet occupation in 1940 is socially just, Feldman highlights how imposing abstract notions of private property onto lived space juxtaposes Estonian owners with migrant renters, predicting the ‘othering’ of Russian-speakers in the following three decades of independence. Experiences of deliberate dispossession of Estonian and minority populations are further explored in Õmblus’s (2009) ‘Kaotatud kodud’ [Lost homes], a collection of contemporaneous accounts gathered by members of the Tallinn Tenants Association. Both texts and would greatly benefit from being revisited in 2021, with a focus on the impact of these experiences on the memory and spatial practices of the original migrant community and successive generations.

FORMAL MEMORY POLITICS Key developments in formal memory politics and identity construction are gleaned from Tamm’s chapter ‘In Search of Lost Time: Memory Politics in Estonia, 1991-2011’ in Diener and Hagen’s ‘From Socialist to Post-Socialist Cities’, as well as Petersoo and Tamm’s ‘Monumental conflict: Memory, politics and identity in contemporary Estonia’. The latter was published a year after the riots surrounding the Bronze Soldier in 2007 – a pivotal point in Russo-Estonian relations and memory politics – and curates a collection of essays tracking the history and changing perceptions formal memorials erected in Estonia under Nazi German, Soviet, and independent Estonian rule. The Russo-Estonian memory divide is explored at length by a range of authors from both sides of the ethnic divide. However, the scope of the essays is limited to formal memorials and little discourse exists around the subject of informal or inhabited processes of memory work and heritage-making.

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POST-SOVIET DOMESTICITY Accounts of post-Soviet domestic memory have thus far predominantly been studied by anthropologists. They are analysed from a predominantly Russian perspective, as many of the USSR’s former occupied states have attempted to jettison past socialist associations to develop and present discourses of independent statehood, and in so doing, writing out personal narratives of Soviet domesticity from official state histories and limiting the literature available. Attempts to centralise the marginal domestic realm are made by the ethnographic works of Shevchenko’s (2009) ‘Crisis and the everyday in postsocialist Moscow’ and Morris’s (2016) ‘Everyday Post-Socialism: Working-Class Communities in the Russian Margins’. A personal account of the Soviet Union’s cultural practices around home, art and material objects is made by Boym (1994) in ‘Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia’, focussing on subject matter commonly dismissed as “poshlost”, or bad taste. Presenting accounts of everyday life in post-Soviet Russia, Shevchenko and Morris illuminate the ‘other life’ neglected by mainstream media and academic discourse, showing the agency, identity, and values of people inhabiting the liminal peripherality of panel housing districts. Rather than presenting these sites only as “bearable”, these writings show the unusual attractiveness of this life, bringing dignity to the sites and subjects of their research.

RESEARCH QUESTIONS It is thus hoped that architectural discourses of post-Soviet urbanism can be fused with writings on memory politics and domestic ethnographies, to revise the role of housing districts in cultural production and answer the following research questions: 1) How does ad-hoc spatial appropriation navigate Lasnamäe’s privately owned ‘public’ landscapes?

2) How do experiences of restitution colour Russian-speaking memory and selfidentification?

3) How do these patterns of memory and appropriation differ between the three generations of Russian-speakers Lasnamäe is home to?

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Figure 3: Soviet statues awaiting their fate behind Maarjamäe Castle Museum

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1. FORMAL MEMORY CULTURE Estonian history is characterised by a string of occupations leading up to its first declaration of independence in 1918 and subsequent annexation by the USSR in 1944. The memorial landscape of 20th century Estonia thus bears witness to a cyclical process of creation and destruction by the waxing and waning political powers at home and abroad (Petersoo & Tamm, 2008). As power changed hands, official state narratives of history and identity changed with it. While ethnic Estonians’ counter-memory and insurgent identity were suppressed under Soviet rule, these emerged in the foreground of the first independent government’s cultural politics. Mart Laar’s 1992-1994 “government of historians” fulfilled the popular desire for legal and historical continuity with the first period of independence in an effort to “restore to the people their expropriated history” (Laar, 1988). Discourses of memory were thus brought into the remit of the state, the law and their subsidiary institutions (Tamm, 2013). However, as Lagerspetz (1996) notes, “what took place was not only a reconstruction of the historical memory: it was also a process of construction”, as the socialist period was painted as a “deviation” from the nation’s natural course – a narrative central to the exercise of restitution. Minority histories resisting this generalisation of a homogenous ‘Estonianness’ were swiftly swept to the side-lines, spreading the contestation of the past into the present with clashes over “what, who, and how should be commemorated” (Tamm, 2013).

Young and Light’s (2010) claims of urban space being “an expression of the dominant political regime” have found proof in the exercise of rebuilding Estonian nationhood after re-independence in 1991, whereby the urban realm was staged as a semantic battleground for inherited memories and politics. The forceful and systematic removal of Soviet-era monuments and reconstruction of the highly homogeneous and nationalistic pre-WWII Estonian monuments has taken the extent of a near Hobsbawmian “tradition production” exercise nationalism (Hobsbawm, 1983), inculcating yesterday’s Soviet spaces with the new Western-looking values and behavioural norms of neoliberalism and ethno-nationalism. Centre stage is held by Estonian speakers’ narratives of Soviet “invasion” during the second world war, fiercely denying those of the Russian speakers’ Soviet “liberation” of Europe from Nazi Germany (Petersoo & Tamm, 2008) – disjunctive debates that arose in the 1940s but have been revived with new vigour following the internationally reported “Estonian War of Monuments”, culminating in riots around the removal of the Bronze Soldier statue in 2007 (Burch & Smith, 2007).

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Despite the cacophony of interpretations, the memorials erected and dismounted by the contemporary Estonian state enforce the unilateral narrative of a “small [ethnically Estonian] nation struggling for independence” against hegemonic Soviet occupation (Brüggemann & Kasekamp, 2008). While the forceful subjugation of the independent Estonian state most certainly constituted an act of Soviet invasion, the contemporary systematic erasure of Russian-minority narratives represents a stance of revanchism that has resulted in the widespread disenfranchisement of the Russian-speaking population and an ever deepening “memory divide” and spatial segregation (Jõesalu, 2017; Tammaru, et al., 2015). As Tamm (2013) remarks, “efforts to build new city as all-inclusive consensual national narrative is “complicated by the presence of local, minority, and various “other” identities”, which often manifest in “divergent perceptions of urban iconography and spatiality.” As the Soviet-era sites the Russian-speaking communities have tethered their histories to have been relegated to physical and cultural peripheries, the most notable remaining vestiges are no longer explicit formal objects of memorialisation, but rather informal ones protected by their seeming mundanity and irreplaceable utility. Most significant among these are Tallinn’s Soviet housing districts of Lasnamäe, Õismäe and Mustamäe that collectively house over half of the city’s residents and now act as central sites for memory to be contested (Tammaru, et al., 2015).

Kalevipoeg statue Built 1933, destroyed 1950, rebuilt 2003

Bronze Soldier statue Built 1933, destroyed 1948, relocated 2007 Tsar Peter I statue Built 1910, removed (not destroyed) 1922

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1930

1940

Figure 4: Formal Memorial Landscape of Estonia 1920-2020

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1950

1960

Freedom Square Built 2009

Lihula statue Built 2002, removed 2004

Maarjamae Memorial Built1947, recontextualised 2018

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1980

1990

2000 Nazi German Occupation

Estonian Independence

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2010

2020 Soviet Occupation

Figure 5: Distribution of Tallinn’s housing stock by era and typology

1960s

2020

Figure 6: Communal space as planned (left, in red outline) and as replaced with supermarket chains (right, in black fill)

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2. DEVELOPMENT OF MASS HOUSING DISTRICTS The USSR’s housing districts were a vast experiment in the socio-spatial organisation of an egalitarian society, prompted by the housing crisis accompanying rapid industrialisation and urbanisation in the mid-20th century (Alonso & Palmarola, 2014). As forced industrialisation and migration swiftly spread across the USSR’s annexed states, the housing crisis followed. A USSR-wide construction programme bearing the slogan of “to every family its own apartment” was launched by Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev in 1953, centred around the khrushchovka – a mass housing model for single families (Diener & Hagen, 2013).

Early housing estates were planned around minimal apartment sizes with access to generous communal facilities of schools, culture centres, saunas, sports, and recreation, in which the homo sovieticus could participate maximally in socialist life. The awardwinning and Nordic-inspired ‘forest suburb’ housing districts, such as Tallinn’s Õismäe and Mustamäe, garnered wide-spread popularity but were soon abandoned for a more efficient, but monotonous Plattenbau style. As prefabrication progressed, initially 4-storeyed khrushchovkas mushroomed into mikrorayons of 15 storeys, reshaping Soviet cities through entire districts and their required infrastructure built anew. By the late 1960s – the time of Lasnamäe’s construction – their original desirable features were abandoned for the sake of cost and efficiency. These typologies attracted increasing criticism on account of their “poor quality of construction, inadequate maintenance and general discomfort” (Alonso & Palmarola, 2014), but still constitute the backbone of Tallinn’s housing stock today (See Fig. 5).

Advances in fabrication also accompanied a shift from more communal to individualistic lifestyles. The generous outdoor and community spaces of early designs were scrapped to provide larger apartments for more comfortable individual indoor space at higher overall densities, with USSR-wide SNiP standards set at an average 9m^2 and minimum of 4 m^2 per person (Treija and Bratuškins 2019). In contrast to the lusciously forested early schemes, landscaping was virtually absent and due to limited funds, and the few communal centres in Lasnamäe’s design remained unbuilt, leaving little planned public space provision for a makrorayon of more than 100,000 residents. Sites of planned centres in mikrorayon sub-districts have instead been filled by supermarket chains (See Fig. 6), while the limestone landscape shows an architecture unfinished, with the intermittent terrain vague constituting ‘public space’ often only facilitating ad-hoc appropriated uses.

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The systemic lack of public amenities become particularly problematic when considered in relation to the districts’ ethnic marginalisation. The high rate of foreign net migration during Lasnamäe’s construction in the 1960-1990s skewed the district’s demographics toward Russian-speaking blue-collar workers from its inception, as new migrants were prioritised when providing flats in new housing schemes upon their arrival (Nerman 1998).

Between 1953 and 1989, Tallinn’s population increased by 70% and the share of Russian speakers rose to near 50% (Kährik, et al., 2019). Soviet panel estates have remained Tallinn’s most ethnically segregated and socially marginalised areas, housing 58% of the city’s population and the highest concentration of minority groups at the lowest levels of perceived social status and upward social mobility (Tammaru, 2019). Based on ethnic grounds, these sites are subject to increasing stigma and unpopularity among Estonian speakers (Kährik, et al., 2019) and became the centre of great conflict and controversy during the processes of restitution that followed Estonia’s re-independence.

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3. RESTITUTION AND DISPOSSESSION Various forms of property restitution took place in most former member states upon the fall of the USSR, often deliberately dispossessing marginalised groups in the process (Aleksahhina, 2006). In the Estonian context, the process of restitution was primarily framed as an abstract moral exercise of “turning back time” (Feldman, 1999) – a narrative of continuity with the first 1918-1940 period of independence central to the reborn state’s politically-minded memory work. On grounds that the Estonian state existed de jure throughout the illegal Soviet occupation, the 1991 ‘Law on the Fundamentals of Ownership Reform’ postulated the restoration of property ownership to the original owners in June 1940 or their descendants to “overcome the injustice done with violating ownership rights” (Kährik & Kõre, 2013). This strategically dispossessed property and stripped citizenship from many in the Russian-speaking communities, who emigrated after the 1940 threshold and was based on the assumption that the majority would return to their respective countries of origin upon fall of the USSR. This, however, was an erroneous assumption with great consequences, as only 25% of Soviet-era immigrants left Estonia in the 1990s, leaving a ‘stranded’ population predominantly concentrated in post-Soviet housing districts and Lasnamäe in particular (Anniste & Tammaru 2014).

Attempts to restitute these districts’ land to their ‘rightful owners’ proved uniquely contentious. As the vast quantity of socialist housing erected in the 1950s-1970s was restored to pre-1940 owners of what were then largely un-developed parcels of barren land far beyond Tallinn’s municipal borders, property became an abstraction equated with personhood and legitimacy as an Estonian citizen (Feldman, 1999). This set the scene for rising tensions between predominantly Estonian property owners and Russian minority renters, although official property delineations were often not articulated or abided by, due to the highly fractured and unintuitive pattern of land ownership that proved particularly problematic in housing districts. Ownership boundaries of many courtyard plots and ‘public’ land are often shared between 5 or more housing associations. While incentives to develop plots together remain low, these lines of ownership halt public spatial process in an effective gridlock and where formal development is rendered troublesome, if not outright impossible, informal appropriation has taken root, shaping conceptions of publicprivate delineations in the spatial imaginations of Lasnamäe three successive generations.

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Figure 7: Stills from ‘Autumn Ball’ depicting Mustamäe, but filmed in Lasnamäe

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4. CASE STUDY: LASNAMÄE “Inside each one of those damn boxes is a human being who just wants to be happy.”

— Mati the literatus (Autumn Ball, 2007) Synonymous with panel housing districts and the aesthetic and political ‘problem’ they pose, Lasnamäe is deeply engrained in Estonians’ cultural imagination of post-Soviet space. The extent of Lasnamäe’s significance as a shorthand for all post-socialist housing districts is evident from it setting the backdrop for innumerous films depicting Tallinn’s other districts of Mustamäe and Õismäe (See Fig. 7), positing it as the most distilled and evocative embodiment of Estonia’s post-soviet housing. Built in the 1960s-70s, Lasnamäe is representative of broader pan-Eastern European mass housing projects constructed in phase of late socialism which, as discussed in Chapter 2, was characterised by enlarged private flats at the expense of public provision of community facilities and landscaping – design choices that have earned them an international reputation for post-Soviet squalor and prefabricated monotony. This too has been poignantly captured in international film, with ‘Autumn Ball’ Estonia, (2007), ‘Cheryomushki’ Russia (1963) and ‘Panelstory’ Czechoslovakia (1979) frequently recycling the trope of romantic escapades being lost with the memory of where a lover lived, as space is portrayed in tragicomic abstraction, ubiquitous and infinitely replicated (Alonso & Palmarola, 2014). Although such landscapes represent international trends in late socialist housing and their common cultural perceptions, Lasnamäe is unique in the Estonian context as Tallinn’s sole example of late Soviet-era housing projects and in the socio-spatial challenges these present. The unique intersection of the legal, spatial and ethnic processes it exemplifies makes Lasnamäe fertile ground for the study of marginalised Russian-speakers’ socio-spatial experiences and memory culture.

As the most ethnically segregated area (Kährik, et al., 2019) of the fastest segregating European capital (Tammaru, et al., 2015), Lasnamäe houses a distinctive demographic of blue-collar Russian-speaking minorities (Kährik & Kõre, 2013). Recent studies reveal the area’s rising levels of stigma and unpopularity among Estonian-speakers, largely on premises of this ethnicity (Kährik and Tammaru 2010; Leetmaa et al. 2015). On similar ethnic grounds, however, these estates are most preferred by Russian-speakers (ibid).

Alluding to the dignity and desirability uncovered by Morris (2016) and Boym’s (1994) work in Russia’s post-Soviet districts, these polarised preferences suggest the presence of strong Russian-language social infrastructure and accompanying spatial practices that form the heart of the proposed research.

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Furthermore, the emergence of a distinctive identity of a self-prescribed internal ‘other’ in Lasnamäe is likely to partially stem from domestic memories of 1990s property restitution, by which many of its residents were formally stripped of the property and citizenship rights explicitly equated with ‘Estonianness’ and rightful belonging (Feldman, 1999).

Built in the 1960s and populated with immigrant labourers since the 1970s, Lasnamäe illustrates restitution of property to the ‘rightful owners of 1940’ as a vehicle for strategic dispossession and ethnic othering, narratives that have long been embedded into the district’s physical landscape. Despite formally planned utopic communality and the adhoc activities that replaced it, Lasnamäe’s land ranks among the most extreme cases of privatisation in Estonia, with near 100% of land held in private ownership by 2002 (Kährik & Kõre, 2013). This has resulted in an extraordinarily fractured pattern of land ownership, where formal spatial interventions are rendered near-impossible and informal ‘meanwhile uses’ flourish and begin to define the landscape’s use more permanently. It also undoubtedly presents a challenge to the engrained practices upholding the informal social infrastructures necessary for both survival and satisfaction. As a generation without first-hand experiences of communal landownership is now reaching adulthood and the eldest generation is well into retirement, Lasnamäe’s location and the temporal context pose a unique insight into how spatial practices and property delineations are negotiated and engrained in the memory of three successive generations of Lasnamäe’s residents.

From an architectural standpoint, the structure of the late Soviet housing districts lends itself to dissecting appropriation across three diminishing scales. Defined by the original masterplans as the wider housing estate (makrorayon); the smaller component district (mikrorayon) and the individual housing block (khrushchovka), these scales were intended to interlink and provide for various scales of life and activity. However, as Sevtsuk (2018) notes, public space provision for Lasnamäe was deferred across all three strategic scales, with the makrorayon centre, each mikrorayon’s community halls and the communal courtyards and public parks linking them remaining unbuilt to this day. This offers an unrivalled insight into appropriation of post-Soviet space on a range of scales not present in Tallinn’s other housing districts.

Exploring the scale of the Lasnamäe makrorayon at large allows distinctive yet scattered socio-spatial processes to be mapped alongside broader district-wide initiatives, such as those organised by the Lasnaidee architect-activist group. This provides a benchmark against which individual districts’ generalities and anomalies can be compared. However, as the total spatial requirements of daily work, education, and leisure were originally planned to be contained in the scale of a mikrorayon, this forms the primary scale of interest. Priisle, the easternmost of Lasnamäe’s 11 subdistricts (See Fig. 8), was selected as the initial site

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of study, as it is home to several significant local landmarks, such as the Priisle Arches market (See Fig. 9), the HC boxing gym and Lasnaidee’s community gardens, identified in preliminary interviews with residents. The Priisle Arches are of particular interest as a site of appropriation and memory. The Soviet-planned structure at the centre of the mikrorayon was left unfinished upon the fall of the USSR and was immediately appropriated as an informal market by vendors of Russian-language literature and eastern foods, establishing it as a key landmark and pillar of informal social infrastructure (Lasnaidee, 2014). The locally beloved concrete arches, however, fell prey to district-wide developments of big box retailers on land originally earmarked for community centres, sparking widespread outrage and numerous artists’ installations on the site before its demolition in 2015 (ibid). While the onslaught of international supermarket chains is an issue faced by all 11 sub-districts, Priisle is unique in its residents mobilising against the destruction of appropriated sites, although their protests ultimately failed to halt the process. The majority of commercial activity and informal social gathering has since dispersed into the formally undeveloped landscapes in and around courtyard-based housing blocks, providing rich material to be studied at the 1:1 scale of individual khrushchovkas’ material culture.

However, the pressure exerted by Priisle’s community was not in vain. The years of lobbying compelled the protested supermarket chain to establish a fund for the building of “distinctive community infrastructure” in the terrain vague near the former location (Karjus, 2015). As this fund remains unused, Priisle holds great potential as a site of study – recent memories of destruction yield promising material for ethnographic research, alongside a unique ongoing design challenge to envision future public functions for the Russianspeaking communities.

Figure 8: Location of Priisle (red) in Lasnamäe (mid-grey)

Figure 9: Informal market under the Priisle Arches

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Figure 10: Mapped centre of the Priisle mikrorayon, showing lack of public provision, alongside quintessential patterns of supermarket infill and appropriated terrain vague landscape with loophole-driven parking lots and informal pedestrian routes

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METHODS The fieldwork period thus aims gather first-hand accounts of Russian minority memoryand spatial culture to illuminate daily interactions in privately owned ‘public’ space. A mixed method approach combining longitudinal ethnographic study with architectural tools is to be adopted, echoing Buchli’s (1997) accounts of post-Soviet domestic “byt”, or ideological lifestyle, to draw links between seemingly mundane daily practices and political intentionality. Through four months of embedded residence in the Priisle mikrorayon, the study aims to examine space not as “pre-existing”, but as “determined” by both residents’ self-reported and observed practices, with the disparities between the latter two explored to reveal identity as imagined and as presented (Lucas, 2016).

To reach the desired inter-generational informants, first contacts with community gatekeepers will be sought through the key sites of social infrastructure identified in the previous chapter. The first involves taking part in planned architectural and landscaping projects with Lasnaidee, a district-wide architect-activist group aiming to alleviate the social stigma associated with Lasnamäe, while the second informally engages with local businesses, such as the HC boxing gym, housed in the iconic informal heritage site of a former Soviet parking garage. The study ultimately aims to reach and observe five sets of three-generation families who have spent their lives in Lasnamäe and have experienced dispossession through the 1990s restitution reform first-hand.

The subsequent semi-structured interviews will draw on Meinhof and Galasinski’s (2002) interview methods in ‘Reconfiguring East-West identities: Cross-Generational discourses in German and Polish border communities’ as methodological precedents. Qualitative interviews will be conducted with individual members of the families or separated or by generational groups (e.g., husband and wife; siblings; etc). This aims to “allow each generation to tell their stories independently” (Meinhof & Galasinski, 2002) and to explore inter-generational shifts in experiences of spatial use, alongside questions of memory and identity pertaining to the restitution of their property. The semi-structured interviews are shaped to allow the direct discussion of themes whilst accounting for their heavily contested subject matter. The use of non-verbal prompts, such as photographs depicting various stages of the district’s development or demolition, act as open-ended cues to avoid front-loading conversation with contested terminology. A similar strategy is also adopted spatially through interviews conducted during resident-guided neighbourhood walks on shared sites, dappled with prompts to verbally indicate of physically illustrate

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landmarks that embody urban change, appropriation or memory. This allows the sociospatial material collected to be guided by what residents feel is most pertinent and enable interactions with the collectively imagined landscape beyond the physical.

Using critical architectural tools of drawing, mapping, and modelling, a taxonomy of these informal practices will be collated based on the ethnographic accounts gathered.

Drawing on the precedent of Lynch’s (1960) mental maps examining key features, such as paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks, this process of critical mapping aims to both archive and analyse Russian-minority spatial appropriation patterns to illustrate what remains neglected in the abstractions of original modernist masterplans and contemporary views from Google Maps (See Fig 10). The dual-pronged ethnographic-architectural approach thus aims to illuminate and celebrate the true cultural complexity of post-Soviet housing districts.

Figure 11: Isonometric of public sauna, constructed of recycled Soviet panels and embedded into the limestone landscape

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CONCLUSION Revisiting Tallinn thirty years after the collapse of the USSR, the proposed research sheds light on a city still grappling with the material and immaterial consequences of socialism.

The essay examines the memory and appropriation threaded into post-Soviet panel housing districts over these years, aiming to revise these landscapes’ representation as cultural deadweight in mainstream architectural discourse. Centralising the marginal, it argues that post-Soviet districts in fact constitute valuable sites of contested cultural production and reveal a unique insight into the intersecting state-led processes of memory production, mass housing and restitution.

The human-scale domestic experiences of these national forces are approached through the sensitive lens of previous anthropological studies, examining their manifestations in memory and spatial practices. The hypothesis of the aforementioned being impacted by 1990s property restitution and extreme privatisation is to be tested through an extensive embedded fieldwork period, drawing upon ethnographic and architectural methods.

Examining the Priisle mikrorayon and the wider Lasnamäe district in Tallinn, the fieldwork aims to cast light on the appropriated public space use of three generations of Russianspeaking residents.

While mikrorayons across Lasnamäe are in dire need of community infrastructure, it must be noted that programs belong to a state structure of a bygone era, and large housing estates currently need not only physical regeneration, but also conceptual innovation.

The fieldwork studies will thus form the groundwork for new propositional approaches to public space design, as explored in studio work. This is approached sensitively and is driven by the minority memory and spatial practices of the Russian-speaking community that form the majority of Lasnamäe’s residents. The design dissertation, centring around a community-owned public sauna (See Figs. 11 and 12), will rely greatly on the findings of this research to inform alternative approaches to indoor public space that celebrate and develop the panel districts’ unique subculture.

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Figure 12: Perspective sketch of outdoor sauna pools, overlooking Lasnamäe’s distinctive landscape

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Aleksahhina, M., 2006. Historical Discourse in the Legitimation of Estonian Politics: Principle of Restitution. Human Affairs, 6(1), pp. 66-82.

Alonso, P. I. & Palmarola, H., 2014. Panel. London: Architectural Association.

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Autumn Ball. 2007. [Film] Directed by Veiko Õunpuu. Estonia: Kuukulgur Film, Homeless Bob Production.

Boym, S., 1994. Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Brüggemann, K. & Kasekamp, A., 2008. The Politics of History and the ‘War of Monuments’ in Estonia. Nationalities Papers, 36(3), pp. 425-448.

Buchli, V., 1997. Khrushchev, Modernism, and the Fight against “Petit-bourgeois” Consciousness in the Soviet Home. Journal of Design History, Volume 10, No. 2, Design, Stalin and the Thaw, pp. 161-176 .

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IMAGE REFERENCES Figure 1 (Cover): Tallinn Museum of Architecture, n.d. Lasnamäe: 9 storey blocks under construction. [Online] Available at: https://www.muis.ee/museaalview/2640066 [Accessed 22 March 2021].

Figure 2: Tallinn Museum of Architecture, 1976. Lasnamäe district, view over buildings.

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Figure 3: Puskar, M., 2008. Postimees. [Online] Available at: https://www.postimees.ee/22397/punamonumentide-seltskond-taieneb [Accessed 23 March 2021].

Figure 4: Author’s own image Figure 5: Stanilov, K., 2007. Housing Distribution in Tallinn. Dodrecht: Springer.

Figure 6: Author’s own image Figure 7: Stills from ‘Autumn Ball’. 2007. [Film] Directed by Veiko Õunpuu. Estonia: Kuukulgur Film, Homeless Bob Production.

Figure 8: Author’s own image Figure 9: Lasnaidee, 2013. Priisle Arches Market. [Online] Available at: https://lasnaidee.ee/2015/01/06/lasnamae-sumboolsed-priisle-kaaredon-havimisohus/ [Accessed 23 March 2021].

Figure 10: Author’s own image Figure 11: Author’s own image Figure 12: Author’s own image

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