A Workshop around the urban heritage of socialist housing and the seeming reconfiguration of the way in which they are dealed with.
Large housing estates continue to be one of the most significant and durable built legacies of the socialist period. The question of how they are managed, maintained, renovated, demolished and perceived therefore remains a crucial one. While programs, projects and practices of renovation, renewal and maintenance of socialist housing estates have been studied comprehensively across the post-socialist context, recent years seem to indicate a certain shift in dealing with this urban heritage. Throughout the post-socialist context, we can observe shifts in dealing with these structures, such as new demolition or renovation programs, modified approaches towards their renewal, new governance arrangements and actor constellations as well as changes in maintenance and finance schemes etc.
This workshop sets out to explore these changes and interrogate their meaning. It holds that the study of housing renovation and maintenance practices as well as the changes therein provide a fruitful lens to uncover broader reconfigurations of state-society-relations in the post-socialist context. While the last three decades have seen different paths of housing provision taking shape in post-socialist countries, post-socialist transformation has been generally characterized by processes of privatization, state withdrawal and the emergence of new subjectivities. The abovementioned processes, however, seem to reveal some new dynamics. For example, alongside the deepening of neoliberalism we can observe instances of the return of strong state intervention and (re-)new(-ed) promises of welfare provision.
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