Temporal and Spatial Dynamics of the New Residential Areas around Tallinn

Abstract

New housing construction is the most visible manifestation of the rapid suburbanization process taking place in the former centrally planned countries of Central Eastern Europe. This paper analyses residential housing construction around Tallinn, the capital city of Estonia, in the period 1991–2005. Our data comes from the New Residential Area Survey that was carried out in 2006. The main results of the study reveal that housing construction was modest in the 1990s, but grew rapidly in the 2000s. In comparison with the Soviet period, private interest led new housing construction to take place in areas closer to Tallinn that were earlier reserved for other functions; that is former agricultural and coastal (often military) areas. Instead of the sprawl of detached housing further away from the capital city seen over time, we find increasing in-fills and multifamily housing construction in the 2000s around Tallinn. This leads to changes both in the internal structure (small but merging settlements close to Tallinn are different from the Soviet time compact settlements located all over the rural areas) and functioning (increase in daily commuting) of the metropolitan area. We argue that the transition period ends in the housing market when a new and better balance between public and private interests emerges in Estonia like in Western Europe.

Acknowledgements

This project was funded by the target funding project no. 0182143s02 of the Ministry of Education and Science Estonia, grant no. 6506 of Estonian Science Foundation, and Phare cross-border co-operation programme no. 2002/000–636.01–0014 for the Baltic sea region. We would also like to acknowledge all respondents for willingness to participate and Dr. Antti Roose for project coordination.

Notes

The start year for the analysis is 1991 when Estonia regained independence.

We defined the suburban area of Tallinn as follows: all municipalities from which at least 15% of the working population commuted daily to Tallinn according to census 2000 belong to the metropolitan area (Tammaru et al., 2004). The suburban area of Tallinn include all the municipalities of Harju county (with the exception of Padise), based on this definition. We also included in our study those new residential areas of the city of Tallinn that are located in the previous agricultural areas on the western edge of the city, as their evolution is similar to suburban housing development.