Development of Mass Housing Districts

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.

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.