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Abstract
This article examines post-socialist transformations by studying material traces and gaps in the Estonian capital. The need for sutures is presented as the consequence of a state of collective liminality, here manifested in the juxtaposition of unfinished projects and in threshold experiences in Tallinn. Relying on empirical examples, literature, architecture, and visual signs, I explore the lack of contextual fit, saturation, and redundancy in this city, concluding that continuous radical changes have increased entropy in the cityscape.
Acknowledgements
Research support has been kindly provided by the project “Culturescapes in transformation: towards an integrated theory of meaning making”; the Centre of Excellence in Cultural Theory (CECT) through the European Union Development Fund; the Estonian DoRa program; and the Georg Simmel Zentrum of Humboldt University. I want to express my gratitude to Siobhan Kattago, Patrick Laviolette, Simon Barker and Madli Maruste for their comments and encouragement while writing this article; also to the reviewers and editors of the Journal of Baltic Studies. A draft of this work has been presented in the XI Urban Landscape Days of the Estonian Academy of Arts.
Notes
1. Recently developed cold places respond, in contrast, to other criteria such as innovation, functionality, profit, and intensification of global processes.
2. Areas expected to be regenerated or redeveloped.
3. Sofia is one of the most extreme examples: 30% of its public green space has reportedly been “lost in transition” (Hirt Citation2012).
4. Tallinn has been called “The Promised Land of Shopping Malls”. See Baltic Business News, 25 October 2013. http://www.balticbusinessnews.com/article/2013/10/25/tallinn-the-promised-land-of-shopping-malls.
5. Marje Feldman remarks that “institutional weakness and fragmentation … breed reliance on fluid and personalized networks instead of enduring partnerships, institutions or class interests” (Citation2000, 847), eventually producing an insane relationship between private investment capital and the municipal authorities.
6. In Sepa, Volta, Fhelmani, Koidu, Kopli .…
7. Hidden, on the second floor of the railway station, we find a Russian-style spa/laser clinic/beauty saloon, a travel restaurant, and a photo exhibition of the history of the place.
8. From my fieldnotes, taken in August 2013.
9. The volume in itself has become an archaeological reading, a precious palimpsest full of biographical time and documental potential. Actually, précis fits very well with the authenticity of the book, which was originally thought of as a compilation of fragments and snapshots of the city in order to contextualize a conference. The volume grew from this modest purpose, becoming the treasure that we enjoy nowadays. I propose to use this book as a trigger and archaeological site in the attempt to depict the contemporary cityscape of Tallinn and update expectations and nostalgias.
10. A User’s Guide to Tallinn was compiled with a reflexive nostalgia, a condition that has been intensified during the last decade. For instance, Laanemets compared the XXII Summer Olympics in 1980 with the Eurovision song festival 22 years later, both as prompters of a building boom and as a chance for local artists to do multiple jobs, ranging from city decorations to souvenir handicraft. In the last decade, the most comparable event has been the city’s gaining European Culture Capital status during 2011, with lights and shadows as a result. Though empowering the cultural offerings in Tallinn, the project had only limited success in its three important goals: to open the city to the seaside, to stimulate several communities and neighborhoods (not only the old town but also areas where the Russian-speaking community is the majority such as Lasnamäe), and to serve as a durable platform for cultural activities. We also find examples of this reflexive nostalgia in Tõnu Kaalep’s text, arguing that ten years ago “Lasnamäe lived by its own rules”, or in Peeter Sauter’s, describing the aura of Mustamäe as “bright, and filthy and callous”, a “product and symbol of the Soviet era”, and “a misanthropic concrete desert”. Jaak Kilmi has already written about the decline of the Väike-Õismäe area and its metamorphosis into a more silent quarter. He remembered how the panel of concrete was an innovative building material containing a faith in progress: “Õismäe inhabitants have been firm believers in progress since childhood. After all, they watched as pastures were transformed into apartment buildings of dimensions yet unseen.” Paul Kuimet and Karen Kulbin presented Tallinn as a good city for skateboarding too: particularly in areas like the port, the Linnahall, around the Kosmos cinema, the hotel Olümpia and nearby the Coca-Cola Plaza. Referring to Kalamaja, Siiri Vallner wrote that in this quarter there is a “slightly loser-like attitude” and “underground feeling”. Nowadays, nobody would consider a walk in Kalamaja as anything wild; quite the opposite, this experience has become quite predictable and “nice”. All the above-mentioned texts are included in the volume edited by Kurg and Laanemets.
11. Hekt is situated near the indie bar “Protest”, in the Rotermanni quarter. With the use of the term “hipster” I do not mean that a bohemian-bourgeois cast has substituted former subcultures such as the punk or any other non-conformist movement. It’s more complex than that and rather contradictory. The paradox is that people reproduce a similar style or look, but don’t merge much with each other. Subcultures still exist, but they have become less relevant since (1) the communities are more fragmented and atomised, (2) there has been a revival of the old dividing crevices such as language or ethnicity, and (3) subjectivization and socialization are more based on consumption and less on political engagement or cultural practices.
12. “They choose Pepsi precisely in the same way their parents chose Brezhnev”; also they are “Pizdets” – “a generation that faces catastrophe”. See Pelevin’s Generation P.
13. For instance, I observe among my students and friends how they have become “working poor” (ibid.), combining multiple badly paid jobs in order to afford the increasing fees of their higher education, and accepting, afterwards, unpaid internships under the promise of career-making.
14. (The transcriptions of this round-table were published in Kurg and Laanemets’s book, Citation2002.) Participants: Kalle Komissarov, Andres Kurg, Mari Laanemets, Markus Kaasik, Andres Ojari and Ilmar Valdur.M. K. “The old town exists completely separated from the rest of the environment. Thus the old town can literally be considered as a theme park.” A. O. “We are unable to use the old town; we cannot manage even with the streets.” A. K. “The old town will disappear from the local city life and will be like a small center of moneymaking, rather than being somehow integrated.” M. K. “The thing about tourism is that one day there is none of it left, it washes away. Tourism swallows itself, the moneymaking machine dries up.” A. O. “All the attention is paid on the fact that tourists could enjoy their walks during the day, but not to keeping alive these who would light up the windows in the evenings.” M. L. “But does it make sense then to concern yourself with the old town or should we leave it to tourists?” I. V. “The city is not anyone’s monopoly.” M. K. “I remember the old town days, which was quite a progressive event in the 80s; everyone went there. Nowadays it has turned into a charade.”
15. According to the official Population Registry date, the number of residents in Tallinn grew by 3.5% in one year (between January 2012 and 2013), therefore this popular measure has contributed to the depopulation process of rural areas and the concentration of the public resources in the capital.
16. For more on the topic see Tuvikene, Tauri, Citation2010. “From Soviet to Post-Soviet with Transformation of the Fragmented Urban Landscape: The Case of Garage Areas in Estonia.” Landscape Research 35 (5): 509–28.
17. Particularly in the old town during the summer, for instance by terraces and tourist offerings.
18. Those interested in encountering prostitutes can go to Luise street, Clazz, or Café Amigo in Viru Hotel. The last offer I heard was in October 2012 in Clazz, €100 for a “massage” by “Natasha”. I still keep the phone number [an odd inclusion?].
19. Dispersed and relocated twice, whilst the space projected for the university has been a parking lot for several years and will probably host an office tower. Otherwise, the art academy is to be relocated again, this time in the former Suva sock factory, a building no bigger than the old one, and in obvious need of renovation.
20. The ground is still owned by Tallinn municipality.
21. As exposed in another of the author’s works, the new main municipal building is to be constructed near the Linnahall. Also, the concert hall has been used for half a year as a storage place of the “Shreck” comedy scene and the Estonian police organizes pursuit training there (shooting with fake bullets). See Martínez, CitationForthcoming in Cultural Geographies. “The Affecting Presence of a Semi-Ruined Soviet Concert Hall in Tallinn.”
22. For more on the topic see Burch and Zander Citation2010 and Tamm, Marek, Citation2008.
23. Still, for the 6.5% of the population of Estonia citizenship is undetermined.
24. Afterwards it was revealed that Flo Kasearu, Andra Aaloe, Tanel Rannala and Juhan Teppart were behind the intervention.
25. As a reaction to the mass protests that followed the relocation of the Soviet Bronze Soldier in Tallinn in April 2007, the government proposed a law amendment, the so-called “April package”, aiming to increase the powers of the police. For more on the topic see http://flokasearu.eu/index.php?/publicspace/freedom-posters/.
26. For more on the topic see Rancière, Jacques, Citation2004. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Continuum.
27. In 2011, there were organized multiple cultural projects associated with the European Cultural Capital. The leitmotiv of the program was to regain the connection of the city with the sea. However, the city hall experienced huge difficulties in regaining some strategically important grounds for regeneration of the coast side due to the private ownership of the land and the drastic rise in market prices. According to several accounts, the main outcome of the project was to set up a pedestrian path along the seaside, which is nowadays known as the Cultural Kilometer. Some buildings have been renovated during the last decade; for instance the former seaplane hangars were transformed into a beautiful maritime museum. Many of these renovations were charged to the European Structural Fund. Estonia became a full member of the European Union and of NATO in 2004, adopting the euro as currency in January 2011. Both dates were supposed to confirm the definitive undertaking of post-socialism; however, such a condition has not been supplanted but supplemented, undermining the socialist patterns yet not replacing them and adding a huge charge of incertitude and confusion.
28. According to the second law, entropy increases with time (except for equilibrium situations), whilst Liouville’s theorem, in contrast, states that the entropy of a system can never change. This paradox is unevenly resolved by chaos. While the numerical value of the volume remains strictly constant, the entropy is expressed as a turmoil shaping the whole system, which stretches in some directions and contracts in others. New tendrils keep appearing and stretch everywhere. Knots of all sorts form and become more and more complicated. The structure keeps getting finer and finer. The underlying scale becomes smaller and smaller, but the value of the volume remains the same, as guaranteed by Liouville’s theorem. The result is an order through fluctuations, in which small causes can have large effects.
29. As said by Ilya Prigogine (Citation1997), transformations produce irreversibility, since the arrangement of sequences does not allow us to re-experience an old experience. In short, it is not possible to reconstruct life towards the past, just towards the future. Towards the past we can only redeem it because we cannot go against the flow of time and avoid improbabilities. Prigogine, I., 1997. The End of Certainty. Free Press.
30. Collier examines the interconnections between neo-liberalism and post-socialism by taking pipes, budgeting formulas, and bureaucratic norms of a small Russian city as privileged sites of study.
31. From my fieldnotes; written in Tallinn, in June 2012.
32. In Tallinn, the ownership of private dwellings rose from 24% in 1993 to 94% in 2000 (Ruoppila Citation2005). During the recent years, the legal rights of property owners have often superseded local government decisions and public good. Ruoppila, Sampo, Citation2005.
33. According to Sergei and Vera, a court procedure over the ownership of the place has been going on for several years; they have gained a trial in the court of first instance.
34. Lija complains that among the 17 people who gained the BA in Law with her, just one has been able to make a career as a lawyer. “Speculators prosper, the rest work as beasts just to pay the loans” (interview done in November 2013).
35. From my field notes taken in Tallinn during 2012 and 2013.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Francisco Martínez
F. Martínez is a PhD candidate in anthropology at the Estonian Institute of Humanities. He has edited Hopeless Youth! (2014, Estonian National Museum) and Playgrounds and Battlefields (2014, TLU Press). His research was awarded with fellowships at the Georg Simmel Zentrum (Humboldt University), the Moscow School of Diplomacy (MGIMO), the Aleksanteri Institute of Helsinki, and the University of Lisbon.