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For more information, please contact the WRAP Team at: [email protected] warwick.ac.uk/lib-publications Placemaking in the Post-Functionalist and Post-Digital City: the Case Study of Ziferblat Aleksandra Kviat A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology Supervisors Prof. Alice Mah and Dr. Hannah Jones Department of Sociology University of Warwick September 2018 Table of contents TABLE OF CONTENTS 2 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS 6 LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES 7 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 8 DECLARATION 9 ABSTRACT 10 INTRODUCTION 11 1. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK 18 1.1. Towards a critical theory of placemaking 19 1.2. Updating the third place theory 24 Conclusion 34 2. METHODOLOGY 36 2.1. ‘Why go to such places?!’ Shaping the research theme and 36 methodology 2.2. Media analysis, observations, interviews, and things in-between: 40 conducting the research 2.2.1. Media analysis. Or post-digital ethnography? 40 2.2.2. Physical ethnography 45 2.2.3. Ethics 53 2.2.4. Data analysis and presentation 55 Conclusion 56 3. WHY THERE, WHY THEN? THE HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL 58 CONTEXT OF ZIFERBLAT’S APPEARANCE 3.1. Placemaking in Tsarist and Soviet Russia 58 3.1.1. Public places in pre-revolutionary Russia 58 3.1.2. Early Soviet period: the rise and fall of social condensers 60 3.1.3. Late socialism: back to the private 63 3.1.4. Soviet cafe culture: the suppressed sociality 64 2 3.2. Placemaking in post-Soviet and modern Russia 66 3.2.1. The 1990s: new hopes, new challenges 66 3.2.2. The 2000s: new actors, new demands 68 3.2.3. 2011–2012: reclaiming the city? 72 3.3. The placemaker: Ziferblat’s history through a biographical lens 77 3.3.1. Growing up in the Third Space 77 3.3.2. Looking for a niche 84 3.3.3. Becoming a placemaker 85 3.3.4. Speaking up: Ziferblat, protests and placemaking 87 3.3.5. Other placemakers 89 Conclusion 90 4. CONSTRUCTING OTHERNESS: THE HETEROTOPOLOGY OF 93 ZIFERBLAT 4.1. Revived and improved: Ziferblat and other spaces 93 4.1.1. Historical spaces 94 4.1.2. Home 98 4.1.3. Social media 99 4.2. A treehouse for grown-ups: Ziferblat as a safe haven 102 4.2.1. The architecture of refuge 102 4.2.2. Our cities, ourselves: the dimensions of escapism 104 4.2.3. The power of looking down 106 4.2.4. Alcohol ban—a shield or a magnet? 108 4.2.5. ‘A moral almshouse’ 109 4.3. Magic, odd, rebellious: Ziferblat as a liminal space 110 4.3.1. The Mad Tea Party effect 111 4.3.2. From silliness to responsibility: the multifaceted concept of 113 freedom 4.3.3. Structure vs. anti-structure: the principle of flexibility 116 3 4.3.4. Experiments in economy and beyond 120 4.3.5. Own, stop, turn back: time in Ziferblat 123 Conclusion 125 5. A LOOSE SPACE: IN THE LABYRINTH OF ZIFERBLAT’S 126 MULTIFUNCTIONALITY 5.1. Cemented with a slash: an overview of Ziferblat’s functions 126 5.1.1. Pay-per-minute cafe 127 5.1.2.Home from home 128 5.1.3. Workspace 133 5.1.4. Cultural centre 136 5.2. Clashes, conflicts, misframings: Ziferblat as a contested space 137 5.2.1. Balancing work and leisure 137 5.2.2. The ethics of ‘everyone’sness’ 140 5.3. Sweets and bitters: Ziferblat’s multifunctionality through the lens of 142 food 5.3.1. Drinking, eating, washing up: mapping Ziferblat’s foodways 143 5.3.2. (Dis)empowered by food: the analysis of Ziferblat’s food 149 politics 5.3.3. Pre-licked biscuits: on legal issues of multifunctionality 155 Conclusion 156 6. WHOSE CULTURE? WHOSE ZIFERBLAT? THE CULTURAL 158 POLITICS OF PLACEMAKING 6.1. Ziferblat and the cultures of cities 159 6.1.1. Ziferblat in Moscow: an enclave 159 6.1.2. Ziferblat in London: a challenge 166 6.1.3. Ziferblat in Manchester: a collaboration 167 6.2. ‘It’s always down to taste’: Ziferblat as a curated space 170 6.2.1. Banned noodles and rejected Twister: the beginning of 170 curation 6.2.2. ‘Serious place, serious people, serious ambitions’ 172 4 6.2.3. Constructing the brand standards 175 6.2.4. Four perspectives on Pink Floyd 177 6.2.5. ‘It’s a compromise’: Ziferblat’s event policy 183 Conclusion 186 7. SOCIAL MEDIA FOR SOCIAL CHANGE: SOCIABILITY, 187 COMMUNITY, AND POSSIBILITY 7.1. The architecture of conviviality: social interaction and community 187 building in Ziferblat 7.1.1. Sociability in Ziferblat: between bubbling and mingling 188 7.1.2. Talking appliances and chatty tables: the impact of physical 192 design 7.1.3. When ‘howareyou’ means ‘how are you’: the role of hosts 197 7.1.4. Eat, play, talk: special interactive frameworks 199 7.1.5. Excited, addicted, exhausted: the outcomes of forced 202 sociability 7.2. A space of hope: on the societal impact of Ziferblat 205 7.2.1. All-friendly? The issues of inclusion and diversity 205 7.2.2. Alternative economies, traditional dilemmas 212 7.2.3. Proto, infra, para: the political in Ziferblat 215 Conclusion 219 CONCLUSION 221 BIBLIOGRAPHY 228 APPENDIX A. LIST OF PARTICIPANTS 252 APPENDIX B. INTERVIEW QUESTIONS 254 APPENDIX C. THE MISSION OF ANTI-CAFES: A NON-ZIFERBLAT 256 PERSPECTIVE APPENDIX D. FOOD ETIQUETTE IN TREEHOUSE 257 APPENDIX E. FILTERING DONATIONS IN TREEHOUSE 259 APPENDIX F. UMA2RMAN INCIDENT IN POKROVKA 260 APPENDIX G. TVERSKAYA MANIFESTO 261 5 List of abbreviations CEO: Chief Executive Officer CIS: The Commonwealth of Independent States; an alliance of former Soviet republics, including: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Russian Federation, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan CMO: Chief Marketing Officer COO: Chief Operating Officer CTO: Chief Technology Officer DIY: Do It Yourself ICT: Information and Communications Technology PPS: Project for Public Spaces ZLHG: Ziferblat London Hosting Guide ZUKI: Ziferblat UK & Ireland 6 List of tables and figures Table 1. Comparative characteristics of four Ziferblats. Table 2. Staff participants. Table 3. Guest participants. Figures 1.1 and 1.2. Pokrovka: main space and ‘the library’. Photos taken by the author, July 2016. Figures 2.1 and 2.2. Tverskaya: counter and one of the rooms. Photos taken by the author, March 2017. Figures 3.1 and 3.2. Old Street: main space and kitchen. Photos taken by the author, July 2016. Figures 4.1 and 4.2. Edge Street: main space and kitchen. Photos taken by the author, February 2017. Figure 5. Heterotopic design in Pokrovka. Photo taken by the author, December 2016. Figures 6.1 and 6.2. Hard and soft seating in Edge Street. Photos taken by the author, February 2017. Figure 7. ‘Social’ coffee machine in Pokrovka. Photo taken by the author, July 2016. Figures 8.1 and 8.2. Kitchen navigation in Old Street and Edge Street. (Photos taken by the author, February 2017. Figure 9. ‘Social’ sink in Pokrovka. Photo taken by the author, July 2016. Figure 10. Fridge poetry game in Old Street. Photo taken by the author, April 2016. 7 Acknowledgements This project was funded by the University of Warwick Chancellor’s International Scholarship. I am also grateful to the Department of Sociology for supporting my fieldtrips to Moscow, London, and Manchester. I was incredibly lucky to have Alice Mah and Hannah Jones as my supervisors. Not only have they been patiently guiding and supporting me emotionally throughout this research, but they have also provided numerous useful comments and suggestions, always encouraging me to think sociologically. Academically and personally, they have been and remain a great inspiration for me. I would like to thank my colleagues in the US, the UK, and Sweden: Cynthia Buckley and Mark Steinberg from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who provided critical feedback on my very sketchy working paper in 2013 and encouraged me to explore anti-cafes further; Cath Lambert, Nicholas Gane, Claire Blencowe, Maria do Mar Pereira, and Hila Zaban from the University of Warwick, whose comments at different stages of my research helped me to shape the theme and key arguments of this thesis; Liudmila Voronova and her colleagues from the Södertörn University for their invitation to give a talk about this project in April 2017. While at Warwick, I was also lucky to teach with—but, in fact, learn from—Lynne Pettinger, Amy Hinterberger, Andre Celtel, Sivamohan Valluvan, Katy Harsant, and Sam Burgum, which was immensely helpful for designing and conducting this study. My PhD journey would have been much more difficult without the support of Janet Smith, the Warwick Sociology PhD Programmes Officer. I am indebted to all those who participated in this research, sharing their stories and experiences and being so generous with their time—the most valuable thing in Ziferblat. This project would have never been accomplished without my friends and family in Russia and the UK, who have supported me in all possible ways, especially at the last and most difficult stages: Andy Chappell, Olga Yakimuk, Anna Lustgarten, Georgia Karaiskou, Irina Rudnichenko, but most of all, Maya and Georgy Kviat, whose unconditional love and unfailing interest to my studies is what always keeps me afloat.