This research program explores the past, present, and future lives of socialist housing estates by interviewing planners and architects who were active practitioners during the Soviet years to cover undocumented information—about site planning and locations of housing estates—that has strongly affected urbanization patterns since.

In Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), modernist housing estates, built between the 1950s and 1990s to meet housing demand and rebuild cities after World War II, introduced revolutionary changes in urbanization. Today, maintaining the social mix, quality of life and attractiveness of vast housing estates is one of the greatest challenges facing post-Socialist cities. To address a knowledge gap about socialist urban planning implementation in the Baltic States and the planning challenge to maintain these estates, planners and architects during the Soviet era (as well as those practicing more recently) will be interviewed to learn how to improve in an innovative way the future lives of housing estates in the Baltic Sates of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

Acknowledgement

This research project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement no. 655601.