ANNA ZHELNINA. "Good" Housing and "Bad" Neighbors: How The Housing Demolition Program Divided Muscovites
1/1 | A rally against the housing renovation program in Moscow, which was attended by around 20 thousands of people, May 2017. Photo: Evgeny Feldman for Republic. Source: www.republic.ru
Moderated by Anna Bitkina and Maria Veits / TOK
In 2017, the Moscow government announced “Renovation:” an urban renewal project that proposed to demolish over 5 thousand apartment buildings across the city. The residents were invited to vote on the inclusion of their building but the very idea of mass demolition of buildings of varying quality and condition outraged many Muscovites. In each building, there were opponents and supporters of the program. We’ll talk about the images of “good” housing among the residents of the condemned buildings, how they pursue it, and how the program divided neighbors into two camps: “zasnosy” and “antisnosniki”.
ANNA ZHELNINA holds a PhD in Sociology from the City University of New York (USA). Her research interests include such topics as urban civic participation, challenges of engaging neighbors in diverse neighborhoods, and the mechanisms that urban political players employ to promote their visions of the city’s future. Her doctoral dissertation, “Engaging Neighbors: Housing Strategies and Political Mobilization in Moscow's Renovation,” explores the political developments triggered by a large-scale urban renewal project in Moscow, the competing visions of the “good city,” private and common good, and ways to achieve it that clashed during the Renovation controversy. Anna has joined the Helsinki Institute of Urban and Regional Studies as a postdoctoral researcher in September 2020 to work on a new research project “Urban utopias, citizenship, and alternatives” to develop sensitive research tools that would capture the complexity of urban political relations and micro-interactions of different players in urban politics.
The event takes place as a part of the program “Get Real!”, a series of online discussions about housing policy and new forms of (co)existence curated by TOK in December 2020 - June 2021 as a part of 5 season of its ongoing project “Critical Mass”. New season focuses on the emerging and complex issues of housing, real estate, urban development, contemporary and historical housing conditions in post-socialist and neoliberal contexts as well as pressing socio-political and environmental processes in megacities.