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.

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