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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