Ecologies of Affect: Placing Nostalgia, Desire, and Hope

7. Cityscapes of Desire: Urban Change in Post-Soviet Russia

Cityscapes of Desire Urban Change in Post-Soviet Russia OLGA PAK I was standing in one of Moscow’s streets in the summer of 2007, gazing at old and new buildings. A man came up to me and asked: “Do you like how this city is changing?” “Why do you ask?” I replied. “I personally don’t like this new city. I was born here … quite a while ago. Now I can’t even say ‘it is my city’ anymore. It ceased being built for people. It used to be spacious and welcoming. Now it’s cramped and unkind. I just wanted to let you know that it used to be better,” the man explained to me and continued his way along the street.1 Varying from glorification to aversion, sentiments about post-Soviet cityscapes fuse affective perceptions of rearranged spaces, imaginaries of desirable living, and aspirations and disappointments associated with political change, as well as persistent references to the Soviet past. It is this nexus that I interrogate in this chapter. I discuss how post-Soviet urban space is contested in the overlapping domains of desire and affect and how these contestations result in reimagining the Soviet city, as well as in its transformation into an idealized space of both nostalgia and hope. Post-Soviet urban “transition” (the term widely employed in postsocialist studies) has been explored from different perspectives: physical restructuring of cities, their market saturation and economic growth, changes in social groupings and policies, social and political controversies, urban art, etc. (e.g., Alexander, Buchli, and Humphrey 2007; Andrusz, Harloe, 143 7 144 DESIRE and Szelenyi 1996; Brade, Axenov, and Bondarchuk 2006; Czepczynski 2008; Ioffe and Nefedova 1998; Iyer 2003; Leskin 2008; Pivovarov 2003; Stanilov 2007; Tsenkova and Nedovic-Budic 2006; Yurasovsky and Ovenden 1994). I attend to the changes in how people imagine the transforming post-Soviet and disappearing Soviet urbanity rooted in people’s everyday experiences, perceptions, and symbolic conceptualization of various city spaces. I argue that not only the visible, tangible, and countable metamorphoses (re)shape the concept of the post-Soviet city, but these changes also transform the understandings developed by city dwellers about their cities. I discuss a post-Soviet “transition” through exploring the social imagination of the post-Soviet “transition” reflected in city spaces. Soja (2000) describes the “urban imaginary” as “a mental or ideational field, conceptualized in imagery, reflexive thought, and symbolic representation , a conceived space of the imagination” (11). Shields (2005) argues that the urban is the city’s virtuality, which is “as much imagined as it is lived,” “the naming and characterization of the world as a space of significant objects and processes” (383). Following these ideas, I view urban imaginaries characterizing the Soviet and post-Soviet city as virtualities—a lived reality, the imagined “truth” about people’s encounters with the city. I discuss the city’s virtual dimension as the domain where responses to existing and existed materiality of the city and ideas about the city’s future are constructed and contested in relation to people’s experiences, desires, hopes, and notions of the good life (see Park in this volume). This chapter is focused on the moments of such contestation in the context of post-Soviet transformation of cities. My analysis is a further explication, complication, and contextualized illustration of the idea that “[u]nlike the concrete physicality of the city, the intangibility of the virtual makes it a domain open to intervention , métisage and experimentation by those with less power and resources, despite being resistant to immediate change through merely material interventions . Thus spaces may be appropriated and events hijacked for new ends” (Shields 2005, 384). I start with a case of an ambitious project called Okhta Centre in the Russian city of Saint Petersburg to discuss (1) how contested desires motivate reconfiguration of the urban symbolism that thus becomes the domain where the right to the city is articulated; (2) how regardless of its origin and history, existing materiality of the city is idealized in popular imagination and thus serves to contest current undesirable physical and ideational transformations ; and (3) how, when challenged, people’s aspirations for desirable change can motivate reimagining the Soviet city. Building on this case and presenting other examples of popular responses to post-Soviet city (re)mak- ing, I further discuss how the post-Soviet city, imagined as the space of wasted hopes, allows the...