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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 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.