Petrosyan is clear that any solution to Yerevan’s informality conundrum will come through the careful development of new planning guidelines, rather than top-down administrative decrees. But the problem is so deeply rooted that it is hard to see a way out. Ruben Arevshatyan sees the current mess as an extension of the broader 20th-century battle for the soul of cities: “Conceptually there is still this struggle between a modernist vision of the city and an older vision, even as we enter the postmodern, neoliberal era. The new government has come up with the same ‘modernist’ attitudes to get rid of this architecture — but there is no recipe for how to do that. The scale is too enormous.” His suggestion is to try and learn from the situation. “Some of these buildings, in their architectural imagination, are quite bold,” he laughs. “When you try and understand the psychology of these extensions, it goes deep inside broader cultural problems.”

Psychology may be the key word here. Since it is hard to imagine any feasible practical solution — demolishing these structures would be expensive, logistically nightmarish, and almost certainly highly illegal; regulating them scarcely easier — we might as well think along more anthropological lines. Even if urban planning is streamlined post-revolution, there will be a social aspect to any progress made. The movement that brought the government Petrosyan now works for to power saw an explosion of civic activism, as people took to the streets of Armenia’s towns, co-opting urban space towards a common goal. That kind of large-scale communal thinking will be needed to overcome the individualistic impulse towards private ownership rights that has led to the current impasse. “Over time, we need to change the situation,” Petrosyan says, “so that people refuse to use these structures and understand that claiming public space is unacceptable — that they need to give it back to society.” Informality in architecture is so often an expression of individual impulses. In Armenia, that may no longer be tenable.