Methods

The fieldwork period thus aims gather first-hand accounts of Russian minority memory- and 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

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