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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