Delai Sam: social activism as contemporary art in the emerging discourse of DIY urbanism in Russia

Abstract

Delai sam (do it yourself) is a deeply rooted phenomenon in Russian life. However, as a form of contemporary art, this phenomenon has taken on an activist tenor in post-socialist urban Russia. Founded in 2010, the Delai Sam Festival of Urban Actions represents a politicized approach to DIY urbanism in today’s Russia, in which artists, designers, activists and scholars are joining together to develop alternatives to official visions for the design and planning of their cities. This article critically examines the discourse of the first few Delai Sam festivals in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, and related urban interventions, to understand how these actions are both situated within their local context, and linked discursively to global trends in art and urban activism. DIY actions like Delai Sam open windows into the convergence of art and social activism, the aesthetic and the political, currently taking shape within the global city.

Keywords:

• art
• activism
• DIY urbanism
• urban intervention
• post-socialist
• Russia

Acknowledgements

During my time in Moscow and Saint Petersburg I was hosted and funded by the Strelka Institute for Media Architecture and Design and the Center for Independent Social Research. Additional funding was provided by the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. In Russia I had the benefit of collaboration with Partizaning, and I thank Shriya Malhotra and Anton “Make” Polsky for their invaluable insights into the situation of urban activists in Moscow. Finally, I am grateful to fellow artist and researcher Maria Semenenko for her guidance in navigating the big city and for her excellent photographs of actions in Moscow.

Notes

1. The Moscow Urban Forum is an annual international three-day urbanism conference sponsored by the Moscow municipality. Begun in 2010, the forum aims to address specific planning and design issues faced by the city by attracting big-name international architects, scholars and potential corporate investors to interact with local government officials to create and share knowledge about the city. The forum can be taken as a gauge of the planning and design priorities and concerns of the Moscow municipal government, and understood as an important example of the government’s recent efforts to increase transparency with respect to its plans for the city.

2. One measure of the perception of social inequality in post-socialist life can be found in a survey of Moscow residents conducted in 2001, in which only 11% of respondents rated their family’s material condition as “good” or “very good”, and 34% as “poor” or “very poor” (Kolossov and O’Loughlin 2004), with the remaining participants describing their condition as “average”. This is not surprising: Despite being one of the world’s most expensive cities, Moscow ranks 190th out of 215 large cities in terms of quality of life (Hirt and Stanilov 2009, 73).

3. These provisions reflect an upsurge in preservation activism by local NGOs, like Archnadzor and the Moscow Architectural Preservation Society (MAPS), since the mid-2000s. From 1992 to 2005 the entire historic center of Moscow was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site (Hirt and Stanilov 2009). Currently only the Kremlin and Red Square remain on that list. Between 400 and 700 federally and locally designated architectural landmarks have been lost since 1989 (MAPS, cited in Hirt and Stanilov 2009, 78). While Saint Petersburg’s historic center remains on the UNESCO list, about 32% of the residential stock and 18% of its non-residential stock remains classified as in “substandard” condition (over 40% damaged) (Hirt and Stanilov 2009, 77).