| Abstract [eng] |
Socially formed urban spaces express visions of city development and structure the social processes themselves. Although a direct correspondence between the vision of urban planners and the use of the space never occurs, the analysis of the vision reveals the direction of urban development and the ideologies that dominate it. Liberalisation of the housing sector, the retreat of the state and the municipality from the housing politics after the fall of state socialism, the transference of responsibility for producing and distributing space towards the private sector, shifting roles of the space producers: all of these contributed to new urban expansion tendencies in post-socialist cities. On the one hand, more and more researches reveal a dynamics of residential differentiation – growing differentiation with remaining levels of “diversity” – in post-socialist Vilnius; on the other hand, new urban-architectural forms proliferate in the city. Differentiation in space and space differentiation raise issues of the sociospatial shift of the post-socialist city. The dissertation adds the missing pieces to the residential differentiation researches: future-oriented project of urban development is analysed, as well as the vision of the good life in the city. The starting point is the shifting diversity of the post-socialist city, discovered in the residential differentiation researches; the opaque notion of diversity that saturates urban studies is conceptualised in order to interpret the post-socialist urban development vision. The object of the dissertation is new housing developments: they are investigated as representations of space defined by Henri Lefebvre, i.e., “discourses on space”, invented or imagined space, space created by space-forming experts, an offer of the post-socialist urban lifestyle. Analysing the discourse of diversity leads to localising in it the post-socialist city vision established through the architectural-urbanist practices of housing. Typology of housing developments is charted, housing developments' space is investigated together with the narratives on life at home and in the city that are conveyed by the descriptions of the aforementioned developments. The concept of diversity, closely connected to definitions of value and order and the normative vision of the city, can be distinguished into two types: static and dynamic; respectively, a discourse of assimilation and conflict management, and a quest for political community. In the future-oriented vision of the post-socialist city, diversity is seen as a negative trait. Housing developments are characterised by the anti-urban approach towards space and the narratives describing it. Home is constructed as space of privacy and control, area of similarity. These practices neglect diversity as an open, possibly conflictual space, in favour of visions of the idealised, safe, conflict-less space. Good life in the city is related to the absence of the city, i.e., life in a small community surrounded by nature. The future-oriented vision of the city is saturated with the ideology of privacy, which is normalised as a self-explanatory, non-questionable, positive modus of urban development. Housing developments as post-socialist urban space representations are interpretted as revelations of Vilnius being a non-political city. |
