Paper short abstract:

We discuss a pilot project initiated by the Estonian state to scale down shrinking towns and study how the demolition of housing and relocation of residents in Ida-Virumaa is meant to retemporalise this region towards the future, after a century of modern mono-functional industrialism & extractivism

Paper long abstract:

For anyone born in Eastern-Estonia after the Soviet collapse, decline is all they have known; a decline that is durable and contagious, generating negative affect, leading to disurbanisation, disinvestment, unemployment, emigration and industries closing down. Along with increasing regional disparities and a spatial stigma, Ida-Virumaa faces a scenario of partial loss of key services (schools, hospitals, businesses). The politics of the present and the infrastructures inherited from the past intensively meet here, showing multiple endings but few new beginnings. In this context of negative capability, whereby future-making is no longer a possible outcome without dealing with the leftovers of Soviet modernity, the sacrifice of half-empty housing appears as part of constructing the promise of a new, desirable future and better life.

We critically investigate multi-scalar strategies to cope with decline and the epistemic dimensions of the half-empty phenomenon. Over a year, we have been meeting with the state, regional and municipal expert groups involved in the down-scaling strategy; we have also carried dozens of face-to-face and phone interviews with local neighbours, attended information meetings to explain the relocation process, and visited the apartments where the residents are supposed to move in. Half-empty khruschyovkas and Stalinistic ensembles have become sadly iconic, forming the (negative) social imagination of how the region is conceived and referred. Demolition and relocation, in turn, put the emphasis on management of decreasing resources; financial efforts are not oriented towards growth or progress anymore, but to how make the urbanity of this place last in time.