Life in the City

One of my former students is now living in one of the (post) Soviet peripheral high rise neighborhoods of Tbilisi, Georgia. Her experience highlights that important aspect of post-Soviet life: the centers of many East (and Central) European cities are charming (if sometimes decrepit), and the peripheries, where the buildings all went up in aesthetically-challenged times, are generally not. 

Back in 1987, several people I knew lived in what seemed to me to be wonderful old buildings in downtown Leningrad, and they explained to me that they were resisting "kapremont" -- capital renovation. The city wanted to move them out of these apartments temporarily to make capital improvements, but they were afraid that once they'd been moved to the edges of the city, they might never see their downtown apartments again. So despite the leaky plumbing, the cracking walls, and the rats, they continued to fight Soviet officialdom. This seemed to me utterly reasonable at the time -- but then, so did the fact that they knew people with squatting rights in a building on Palace Square right next to the General Staff Headquarters.

The squat was in a building just to the left of the
General Staff Building (now a part of the Hermitage Museum).

In a vast space in that mostly abandoned building, they would party and play ping pong and generally stay under the radar. At my university classes I was learning about the architects of the city of St. Petersburg -- the General Staff Building, for example, was designed in the Empire style by Carlo Rossi and built in the 1810s-20s. To me -- an American, and a suburban one at that -- the European edifices were utterly romantic and had immense appeal, especially in comparison to the brand-new Leningrad State University 18-story dormitory building in which I lived -- with its leaky windows that couldn't withstand the gusts of icy wind off the Gulf of Finland, and its eternally broken elevator that made me grateful I lived on the 8th floor and not the 18th.

In the 1990s, some other friends in (now) St. Petersburg moved from their overcrowded Vasilevsky Island apartment with its 16 foot ceilings and parquet floors to an overcrowded two room apartment in a generic-looking block of buildings far from the center. I was confused. Instead of walking to their place from where I was staying near the university, I had to take the metro and a "microbus" / marshrutka (literally a "route taxi"). Instead of climbing the wide (sometimes stale with the smell of urine, tobacco, and god knows what else) staircase to the third floor, I rode to their flat in a tiny, questionable elevator. Instead of the ten-foot high majestic deep-set windows overlooking Maly Prospekt, their flat had small modern windows that opened onto a mud-and-parked-car-filled space between buildings. The romance was gone.

But my friend's wife insisted that "the air is better" for the children out away from the city, and certainly it was more convenient -- now that they had a car -- to drive to the supermarket for diapers and juice rather than shlepping to the corner markets in the center. And so much easier to park.

Who could resist this Polish beauty?

Since that time, my friends' fortunes have improved yet again, and they have renovated a beautiful 7-room apartment in a 1913 building once occupied by Matilda Kseshinskaya, the ballet dancer who had been Tsar Nicholas II's mistress before his marriage. I suppose we could call this "gentrification." To create the apartment, they had to buy out a number of residents in at least two communal apartments and reconfigure the space to obliterate its Soviet aspect. Now they live in a European-style building not far from the center, the parks, the Neva River. No longer trapped in an unrenovated communal apartment or a Soviet high-rise, they quite frankly live in the fanciest apartment I have ever visited. I think their neighborhood must be the St. Petersburg equivalent of the upper West Side -- luxury living, close to everything, and, somehow, with parking for their two SUVs.

My former student (who blogs here) loved her life in the Baths' district in the center of Tbilisi -- near museums and restaurants and other cultural destinations. But recently she has moved out to a more affordable neighborhood, i.e. a post-Soviet slum. By this I mean those blocks and blocks of apartments built to accommodate citizens in the post-war period and especially from Khrushchev on. She and I have been debating the applicability of this Guardian article to her new situation: is her "Soviet suburb" a "creative hotspot," or merely a place to live? 

Irony, or merely descriptive? In the stairwell, Tbilisi, Georgia.

I started this post last week when we returned to the city of Philadelphia for the summer -- a place also redolent with smells, and graffiti, of all kinds. It is worth musing on the relationship between the built environment and creativity, between economic prosperity and historic neighborhoods and housing for the masses. What's particularly interesting is to think of how all that plays out not just in Philadelphia, but also in Tbilisi and Warsaw, Vilnius and St. Petersburg.