The Urban Book Series Daniel Baldwin Hess Tiit Tammaru Editors Housing Estates in the Baltic Countries The Legacy of Central Planning in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania The Urban Book Series Editorial Board Fatemeh Farnaz Arefian, Bartlett Development Planning Unit, University College London, London, UK Michael Batty, Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London, London, UK Simin Davoudi, Planning & Landscape Department GURU, Newcastle University, Newcastle, UK Geoffrey DeVerteuil, School of Planning and Geography, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK Andrew Kirby, New College, Arizona State University, Phoenix, AZ, USA Karl Kropf, Department of Planning, Headington Campus, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK Karen Lucas, Institute for Transport Studies, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK Marco Maretto, DICATeA, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Parma, Parma, Italy Fabian Neuhaus, Faculty of Environmental Design, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada Vitor Manuel Aráujo de Oliveira, Porto University, Porto, Portugal Christopher Silver, College of Design, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA Giuseppe Strappa, Facoltà di Architettura, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Roma, Italy Igor Vojnovic, Department of Geography, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA Jeremy W. 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More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/14773 Daniel Baldwin Hess • Tiit Tammaru Editors Housing Estates in the Baltic Countries The Legacy of Central Planning in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania Editors Daniel Baldwin Hess Tiit Tammaru Department of Urban and Regional Department of Geography, Centre for Planning, School of Architecture Migration and Urban Studies and Planning University of Tartu University at Buffalo, State University Tartu, Estonia of New York OTB - Research for the Built Environment Buffalo, NY, USA Delft University of Technology Delft, The Netherlands ISSN 2365-757X ISSN 2365-7588 (electronic) The Urban Book Series ISBN 978-3-030-23391-4 ISBN 978-3-030-23392-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23392-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019. This book is an open access publication. 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This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland We affectionately dedicate this book to the memory of Rein Ahas, our patient teacher, mentor, and friend. We also dedicate our work to those who designed, constructed, and have resided in housing estates in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. From them, we have learned much about communal living, urban progress and social change. Preface In this book, we further our scholarly engagement of housing and cityscapes by extending the research presented in our previous book, Housing Estates in Europe: Poverty, Ethnic Segregation, and Policy Changes (D. B. Hess, T. Tammaru, and M. van Ham, eds., Springer, 2018). The fortunes of modernist housing estates continue to be topical, and this new book therefore takes a more-in-depth look into the various challenges related to them. Our research would not have been possible without Daniel Hess’ academic stays in Tartu, Estonia, funded first by a Fulbright Scholar Award and second by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie international fellowship. With Estonia as our home base, we sought to consolidate and deepen our understanding of modernist housing estates based on events and examples in the Baltic countries. We began by staging two seminars (both titled Past, Present, and Future of Socialist Housing Estates: Exploring Research Needs in the Baltic States) in October, 2016, first in Vilnius, Lithuania (and held at the Lithuanian Social Research Centre, with organisation assistance from Donatas Burneika and Marija Drėmaitė) followed by Riga, Latvia (and held at the Faculty of Architecture at Riga Technical University, with organisation assistance from Sandra Treija). The sem- inars provided opportunities for scholars to present up-to-date research related to housing estates and to engage with us in discussions about gaps in scholarly knowledge and research needs. We thus considered the advantages of a vertical scheme to research about housing estates, allowing a deep dive into housing estates in the Baltic countries [that differed from the horizontal research scheme in our first book about housing estates, in which the geographic research was large (14 case studies, from Birmingham to Moscow and from Helsinki to Athens) but the scope was limited to poverty, ethnic segregation, policy, and attendant topics] and thus the concept for this Baltic-focused book was born. In the Baltic countries, we found an endlessly fascinating site for studying the triumphs and failures of housing estates. Centrally planned housing constitutes a significant segment of the housing stock in the Baltic countries (and a majority segment of the housing stock in larger Baltic cities). New housing opportunities introduced into the housing market—an important phenomenon in the economy of these post-socialist places—tend to emphasise the weaknesses and challenges of vii viii Preface older housing, and this is a significant occurrence in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, as new housing is continuously added during the third decade of the post-transition era. It thus becomes more important to know how to maintain the status of housing estates in the Baltic countries and prevent their further deterioration (both physical and social). Through our work on this book, we therefore seized opportunities to assess the current status of housing estates (deeply informed by knowledge about their historical formation) and to measure changes since 1990 in their physical condition and social status. The chapters herein delve into influencing forces for housing estates in the Baltic countries, and also explore how housing estates themselves in Estonia were influencers (since their planning and design won important USSR awards). We especially wanted to characterise the trajectory of housing estates in various Baltic settings and in various conditions related to their establishment in the decades following World War II. Chapters in this book also explore particular characteristics of Baltic housing estates in significant detail, such as the (unfulfilled) promise in the original design of nearby and convenient service networks that supported the primary residential function of these modernist dis- tricts. This book thus offers a timely overview of the current status of large housing estates in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, their trajectories, and future outlook, which we have summarised in seven takeaway lessons. The book would not have been possible without contributions from author teams from throughout