Paper short abstract:

This paper explores Cuba’s post-socialist housing transformations, from incremental assetisation since the 1990s, to today's depreciation due to the Post-COVID-19 tourism decline, socioeconomic crisis and mass exodus. It is partly based on 15 months of qualitative fieldwork in Havana 2022-2023.

Paper long abstract:

Since the incremental legalization of rent extraction from housing (1997, 2010) and of free house sales (2011), the economic asset dimension of housing in Cuba has been increasingly reinforced both at the layers of collective housing ideations and concrete housing practices. State-led tourism development, the remittance economy and enhanced possibilities of circular/return migration have reshaped housing production, consumption and exchange towards its re-privatization and marketization since the first post-Soviet period (1990s), but especially since the 2011 launching of structural reforms. Yet, these processes have not been sweeping, even and merely economic and de-personalized. Instead, being socially embedded, they are intersected by (transnational) household livelihood strategies; narratives of housing as family heritage, local community interactions, intense and social networking to achieve housing renovation and rent creation. More recently, the post-COVID-19 tourism decline and the present socioeconomic crisis and accompanying mass exodus have led to housing depreciation and the temporary and uncertain abandonment of this highly valued and scarce resource, turning it somehow into a liability and an object that embodies broader processes of undoing and redoing of Cubans’ relations with the nation. This paper explores these transformations to contribute to the scholarship that asserts the variegation of housing privatization in post-socialist transitions, including tensions between financial pursuits and non-financial considerations. A historical and political economic analysis of Cuba’s housing policies and practices since 1960 is complemented by ethnographic vignettes based on 15 months of qualitative fieldwork in Havana, 2022-2023.

Paper short abstract:

The paper traces and analyses the vernacular concept of gangxu, or inflexible demand, that real estate brokers, developers, homebuyers, and the government in China draw on to refer to—and construct—a need for homeownership as an indispensable criterion for fulfilling urban citizenship.

Paper long abstract:

The paper traces the life of the concept of “ganxu” or ‘inflexible demand,” a vernacular concept that real estate brokers, developers, homebuyers, and the government in China draw on to refer to—and construct—an nonnegotiable need for homeownership as an indispensable criterion for fulfilling urban citizenship. It shows how various actors mobilised "inflexible demand" in different ways to articulate a moral economy of housing in China's post-socialist property market. For example, the newlywed couples claimed to have an inflexible demand for homes so they can start a family; migrants pursued homeownership as a necessity to enroll their children to local public schools; brokers marketed low-end properties as “gangxu homes” to low-income buyers; and, during market turbulence, housing protests demanded the government protect the people who bought a home based on inflexible demand. The term also entered official discourse. In 2014, then Prime Minister Li Keqiang made a speech, “Meet the people’s inflexible demand (gangxu) for housing and avoid turbulence in the housing market.” As such, tapping into state strategies, market language, and citizen aspirations, gangxu has become a keyword that helps consolidate popular assumptions about homeownership, form citizen subjectivities, and constitute the residential real estate economy in urban China. Excavating inflexible demand’s various iterations and embedded uses, I argue for an approach to treat homeownership as an affective, economic, and political entitlement constructed in relation to the regime of urban accumulation, the moral economy of housing, and the building of legitimacy for the post-socialist state.

Paper short abstract:

The paper investigates the changing political significance attributed to the built environment and the urban space in a provincial city in Ukraine. The author postulates that these are governed by three vernacular property regimes - private, public, and personal.

Paper long abstract:

This paper looks at the way in which the post-Soviet macro-scale transformations of property regimes and power relations in Ukraine found their material manifestation in the systems of urban infrastructure of Kryvyi Rih, an industrial city in the country's East. It traces the evolution of the social and political uses of housing (and largely, urban built environment and public spaces), arguing that changes in local hegemonic configurations, far from being restricted to the discursive sphere, have palpable material dimensions. The hegemonic power bloc structures domains that are seemingly distant from the rhetoric of mayoral candidates – such as the quality and amount of new housing. A closer look at the evolution of housing in Kryvyi Rih allows to gain more grounded insights into the workings of the local elite blocs, their legitimation strategies and preferred class alliances.

There are three property regimes regulating the social functioning of the built environment in Kryvyi Rih. Rules concerning personal property extend to all places belonging to individual households: apartments, balconies, garages, cellars, sheds, and dachas. To maintain it, individualist embedded strategies mobilise social ties, which corresponds to the lay morality of a self-sustainable household and at the same time simplifies paternalist legitimation for the incumbent power bloc. The second type of property is private. The autonomous status of this property is rarely contested in the lay moral economy, but it is excluded from the public contract. Public property serves as the background, the default state that gives birth both to personal and private.

Paper short abstract:

Examining the nexus between housing and displacement in the aftermath of the Donbas war in Ukraine, this paper presents two examples of political subjectivity entwining with conceptions of property.

Paper long abstract:

This paper investigates the nexus between housing and displacement in the aftermath of the war in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region since 2014, prior to Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. Housing emerged as the main concern for internally displaced people (IDPs) from Donbas, who emphasised the need to find a permanent, state-led resolution to their housing needs and criticised the interim nature of the state’s measures. Having often lost their own housing in Donbas to bombardment or occupation, the IDPs argued that the state should help them become homeowners again – homeownership being the societal norm in Ukraine. The IDPs predicted that the state’s failure to guarantee stability through enabling homeownership would only lead to the intensification of emigration from Ukraine and thus the loss of both taxes and political subjects.

The paper also discusses the case of a sanatorium in northern Kyiv, where a group of IDPs had been settled by Maidan volunteers in the early days of the Donbas war. Having withstood numerous eviction attempts and threats from the sanatorium’s shady owners, the residents attempted to “wait out” the owners and the Kyiv city authorities by simply refusing to leave. Such a strategy fits a pattern of appropriation of housing into personal property by long-term use. The issue of housing thus brings out in sharp relief questions about political subjectivity in war-time Ukraine and housing as a property object. These issues will be relevant with regards to the principles of Ukraine’s post-war rebuilding and housing distribution.

Paper short abstract:

The paper investigates the transformation of property as an ethical and moral project (Cherkaev 2023) amid ecological and political changes in post-Soviet of Georgia. It analyzes negotiations of new private property rights and obligations between the state and citizens after environmental disasters.

Paper long abstract:

“The government is not the one destroying your homes. It is a landslide, nature, that is destroying your private property” – the Chairman of the Parliament responded to the villagers demanding compensation for the lost property after a large-scale landslide in 2011 in the Eastern highlands of the Republic of Georgia. Being faced with frequently occurring environmental disasters, the highlanders in Georgia used to be provided alternative housing by the government for the state-owned properties damaged by disasters in late Soviet times. The rights and responsibilities between the state and the citizens were later rearranged by the drastic privatization of state-owned assets and the new configuration of public and private, evoked by the Rose Revolution in 2003 (Rekhviashvili 2015). The rewritten social contract between the newly emerged neoliberal authoritarian state (Eradze 2022) and reinvented post-Soviet citizen (Mühlfried 2014) created new aura around property seeming to be “owned” by individuals (Tsing 2002: 97), with the state reappearing as “protector” of private property rights (Hann 2007). However, the legal security of ownership rights revealed its limitations for the people facing environmental disasters. While the disaster-affected people expect the state to compensate for the destroyed or damaged houses after the disaster, the state institutions withdraw from enforcing property rights by considering disasters something the citizens must deal with privately. I investigate the rearrangement of property rights and obligations between the "landlord" state (Bodnar 2001) and the citizen under “force majeure” by looking at how they are legally and morally negotiated in court.

Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at family relations in Riga’s mass housing districts over the course of the 1970s, 80s and 1990s through the lens of moral economy. It shows how complex negotiations within kinship networks regarding the provision of housing came into being that shaped gender and family dynamics.

Paper long abstract:

This paper looks at family relations in Riga’s urban mass housing districts over the course of 1970s, 80s and 1990s through the lens of moral economy. It shows that kinship ties managed to informally distribute resources beyond the market and state. Building on housing distribution lists of the municipality of Riga, I argue that the late Soviet state created and sustained this moral economy and was, then, kept within kinship ties. What sort of intimacies, gender and family relations did this moral economy produce in the late Soviet period and in the transition of the 1990s?

By analyzing court cases and interviews, I demonstrate that a moral economy meant that intimate family relations were inherently about access to housing, living space and proximity. However, this engendered complex negotiations within kinship networks. Sentiments about who deserved and earned to have access to housing and who did not were essential within this moral economy. Instead of understanding moral economy as simply a progressive force, I show that the intimacies that came into being often reinforced strained and paternalistic social relations. Rights and claims to privacy were delicate matters from where conflict emerged on many levels. I conclude by arguing that overtime the community and solidarity beyond the nuclear family regarding the provision of housing and the importance of proximity within family networks turned families inward. Housing became accessible almost exclusively through intimate family ties and social life within the districts became fixated on private and internal kinship relationships.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the attempts of a group of memory activists to commemorate a former NKVD prison in Tbilisi. Ignored by the post-socialist state, and dismissed by the tenants, this paper reveals the complex political and social dynamics that the memory activists’ claims to the building uncover.

Paper long abstract:

Number 22 is an XIX-century building in the heart of Tbilisi that has undergone several changes of ownership over the years. Originally the residence of an Armenian merchant, it later served as a school for male nobility. After the Sovietisation of the country in 1921, it transformed into an NKVD headquarters with prison cells and eventually became a 'normal' housing block for World War II refugees. While it was once home to many, nowadays, only a few families inhabit the building due to its fragile structure. The underground prison cells are inaccessible, with locked access points due to the risk of crumbling ceilings and floors and, unless someone knows of its existence, it is impossible to guess that the metal grills you see in the courtyard have something to do with a basement, let alone a prison.

Since 2010, a small group of memory activists has taken on the task of transforming Number 22 into 'the last tangible evidence of Soviet terror.' However, they receive minimal attention from the broader public, and their activities clash with the desires of the tenants—some of whom want to demolish it, others want to renovate it, and a few stay ambivalent, not wanting to be associated with the dark history of the building. Drawing on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this paper uncovers the complex dynamics between memory and property, the social relations generated by the building's materiality, and the memory activists' claims to commemorate, simultaneously reproducing a difficult heritage.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines an underground organization of autonomous house-builders in late-Soviet Kyrgyzstan. Dismissed at the time as nationalist 'squatters', the paper reveals a complex initiative to visibilise and politicise the right to a home in a context where homelessness was deemed not to exist.

Paper long abstract:

Homelessness (üisüzdük) was an issue that sprung dramatically into public discourse in perestroika-era Frunze, the capital of the Kyrgyz Soviet Socialist Republic. The first non-official organization to be registered in the republic, ashar (denoting mutual help or solidarity) was a movement of autonomous house-builders (samostroishchiki) who, in the spring of 1989, began to seize land around the edge of Frunze to demarcate plots for individual house construction. The vast majority of these samostroishchiki were young, Kyrgyz-speaking men and women who worked in the capital city unregistered. Many had spent years living and raising children in barracks, outhouses, or gender-segregated dormitories, unable to receive the urban registration (propiska) that would entitle them to join the queue for urban housing in what was, by the late 1980s, a majority Russian city.

Ashar was quickly labelled a ‘nationalist’ organization by the Soviet authorities: a characterization that has inflected the still-limited portrayals of the movement in anglophone scholarly literature. Dismissed by central newspapers as ‘land-grabbers’ or ‘squatters’, a closer analysis of the ashar movement reveals a complex initiative to visibilise and politicise the right to a home in a context where homelessness was deemed not to exist. Drawing on extensive Kyrgyz-language sources, including newspapers, pamphlets, memoirs and oral histories, this paper reveals the case of an (ultimately successful) claim to be seen by the late Soviet state and a right to a home: a movement, the legacy of which is still felt in the growth of unregistered settlements around contemporary Bishkek.

Paper short abstract:

The paper deals with socialist housing policy and post-socialist transformation and privatization from the specific perspective of a marginalized group of Roma. It traces (dis)continuities of the exclusion of the Roma as a special ethno-social group for whom housing appears to be crucial.

Paper long abstract:

In my contribution, I would like to look at (post-)socialist housing in Czechoslovakia and later in the Czech Republic from the perspective of a marginalized group of Roma. In doing so, I draw on detailed historical and field research of the town of Most located in one of the most important socialist mining region in the Northern Bohemia, and the adjacent Chanov panel housing estate, which was built in the late 1970s mainly for Romani residents. Until then, they had been concentrated in the centre of the old town, which was gradually being liquidated due to lignite mining. In the specific field of socialist housing policy, the Roma may represent a special chapter, and it is relevant to ask to what extent the egalitarian socialist regime ensured equal access to housing for all groups. In their case, how did it fulfil the promise of the right to use the flat as a measure of privatism replacing private ownership. The Chanov housing estate, gradually referred to as a ghetto, is an extreme case of the socialist state's more general approach to the Roma as an ethno-social group that requires special treatment and access, despite its ideological proclamations. The process of transformation and privatization in the early 1990s also affected the then already relatively devastated Chanov, not at the level of individual apartments, but at the level of privatization of public space and services. This was also linked to the resignation to municipal and housing administration, the roots of which can be traced back to the socialist period. The post-socialist transformation of urban settlements with a high proportion of the Romani population began to create a sphere around which more general socio-economic trends were reflected, but in a somewhat different way. Housing remains, as under socialism, the sphere in which differences between the majority society and the Roma minority are created and reproduced.