From 1917 to 1991 in the former Russian Empire, and from 1945 to 1989 in the countries it dominated after the war, there was no real private ownership. No landowners, no developers, no “placemakers” - in half of Europe. Did this mean public space was done differently, and are attitudes to it different in those countries?

At first, it appears the result was huge boulevards for tanks, windswept squares looked down on by scowling statues, and scrubby open space between concrete slabs – alienating, inhumane, authoritarian. However, observed more closely, public space here is every bit as complex as it is elsewhere in Europe.

Perhaps as decisive as nationalisation and the terror of Stalinism from the 1930s to 50s, is the fact that most of the area was overwhelmingly rural before then. The curator and activist Kuba Szreder, who grew up in 1980s Gdańsk, stresses that Poland was “urbanised and industrialised by communists, who also kept a stranglehold on public life, thwarting political expression and free association”. However, the spaces built don’t always reflect that restriction: the centre of Kiev is dominated by the Khreschatyk, a historic street expanded and remodelled into a supersize Stalinist boulevard after 1945.

Independence Square and the Khreschatyk in Kiev. Photograph: Valentyn Ogirenko/Reuters

For the architect and photographer Oleksandr Burlaka, this is precisely Kiev’s most successful and popular urban space. A “kitsch, ceramic-clad canyon” it might be, but he points out that thousands visit every weekend when the street is pedestrianised. In the 1980s, a public path was cut from Kreschatyk through the back gardens of 19th century houses, which connected with a public square at the top of the steep, green Dnieper embankment, creating a sudden transition from the bustling street to an open panorama: “a massively beloved place”, regardless of its provenance.



Looking at the major squares and main streets of Warsaw, Gdańsk, Tallinn, Belgrade and Kiev, you can’t help but be struck by the chaos of advertising, dilapidation and new developments that are rudely shoved into the interstices of formerly public space. For Dubravka Sekulic, who has written extensively on the effects of privatisation on public space in Belgrade, “the city developed in the post-socialist period of speculative capitalism all of a sudden seems too cruel, as if it’s an aberration caused by the proximity of socialism, and not the usual state of affairs in capitalism”. On asking architects and activists what they consider to be the more unique and well-used spaces in their cities, it’s often the in-between areas of housing estates, rather than city centres, that they point to.



Oleksandr Burlaka claims that the most valuable feature of communist urban spaces lies in their “spatial freedom”, which is “sometimes naive, but a clear urban logic without over-regulation”. As an example, he singles out the Rusanivka district in Kiev, where standard prefab towers of the 1970s are integrated with canals and embankments. Although the built-in water fountains were broken years ago, “it’s still the place for walking, bathing, meeting, with open-air barbecues even in winter”.

The Rusanovka channel in Kiev, where prefabricated towers meet canals and embankments. Photograph: Mike Kiev/Alamy

Dubravka Sekulic argues that it’s precisely nationalisation that made this possible, meaning that “space was a resource whose development should bring equality, not the basis for profit making”. Examples of this in Belgrade include the large courtyards, cafes and schools built around the housing district of New Belgrade. “I get struck each time I visit Blocks 21 and 23 how well their open spaces work, or by the infrastructure next to the river Sava close to Block 45”. These flowing, interlocking spaces around extremely cheap, publicly owned housing, are often the specific targets for development, considered “useless” by investors, if not by residents.

One thing which is unique here is the sharpness of the change, between all space and land being publicly owned, to almost none of it. Right to Buy was brought in for housing throughout ex-communist Europe; according to Maros Krivy, a Tallinn-based critic and urbanist from Bratislava, the “rapid privatisation and restitutions of land and property were as significant in the 1990s as the nationalisation of land was in the late 1940s”. Tallinn, for instance, had to build specifically targeted “social housing” to rehouse those dispossessed by land restitution – before 1991, all its housing was social.

View from Kalemegdan park towards New Belgrade. Photograph: Europix/Alamy

The effects of privatisation and restitution on space and perception differ from city to city, even within one country. “Land and houses are currently being restituted on a massive scale to either former owners or people who acquired property deeds, in a more or less legal fashion”, notes Szreder on Warsaw. “The public space shrinks, people are relocated, schools and kindergartens closed. From a rather well planned city, Warsaw is becoming a capitalist playground.”

In Gdańsk, the (German) former owners are not compensated, and there is less property speculation. “The majority of people could and still can buy council flats.” This accidental freedom is one reason, he says, why “Gdańsk is the cradle of Polish liberalism, as the ideological belief that ‘you can make it’ has a basis in popular flat ownership, just as Thatcherism had its foundation in Right to Buy”.



Krivy is unconvinced that the differences between “western” and “eastern” cities are as significant as some would argue. “Successful spaces are deemed so by successful people”. He singles out Tallinn’s two most “illustrative and symptomatic spaces” – “the conceptual pair of Telliskivi and Balti Jaam market”. Both of these are public spaces in the city centre, but whereas “the former stands for the process of industrial regeneration by cultural use, and is frequented primarily by middle and upper-middle classes, Estonian speakers, expats and tourists, the latter stands for an open-air market where things are still cheaper than in supermarkets, products are displayed in heaps rather than arranged individually, frequented mostly by lower and lower-middle classes, mostly from the Russian speaking minority.”

Contrasts like this could be found anywhere. Similarly, resistance in urban space can be found here as much as anywhere else. For Szreder, the recent wave of protests against the authoritarian measures of the new government, suggest that the notion that space is particularly depoliticised in ex-communist Europe might be changing. “City squares and streets in Poland, instead of being mere logistical corridors or zones of consumption, were transformed, by marching, chanting, gathering people, into arenas of political dissent and mobilisation. This kind of development has not been witnessed here for at least a decade, if not since Solidarity.” Perhaps Eastern Europe is not so special.



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