‘NON-PLACE’ OUTSIDE TIME: INDETERMINACY Body and...
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F O R U M F O R A N T H R O P O L O G Y A N D C U L T U R E, 2 0 1 9, N O 1 5
‘NON-PLACE’ OUTSIDE TIME: INDETERMINACY AS THE SPECIFICITY OF THE EXISTENCE OF LOCALITIES
IN A POST-SOVIET CITY (THE CASE OF IRKUTSK)Dmitriy Timoshkin
Irkutsk State University, Laboratory for Historical and Political Demography 1 Karla Marksa Str., Irkutsk, Russia
National Research Tomsk State University, Laboratory for Social and Anthropological Research 34 Lenina Av., Tomsk, Russia
[email protected] Grigorichev
Irkutsk State University, Laboratory for Historical and Political Demography 1 Karla Marksa Str., Irkutsk, Russia
National Research Tomsk State University, Laboratory for Social and Anthropological Research
34 Lenina Av., Tomsk, Russia [email protected]
A b s t r a c t: The article considers the condition of one of the quarters in the centre of Irkutsk that can be called a ‘time frontier’. This refers to the exclusion of this urban locality from the present time. The place in question has ended up on the border between various projects of the future and the past. This affects not only its architectural appearance, but also its social content. The authors seek to understand whether this situation is reported in the stories told by people who find themselves in the context of the ‘border’ locality, and whether this affects the architectural and social appearance of the post-Soviet city. The study is based on materials of participant observation — the results of ‘strolling’ in Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of that term — and nonformalised interviews. Michel de Certeau’s dichotomy of ‘strategy-tactics’ and Henri Lefebvre’s concept of spatiality have been employed in the processing and conceptualisation of the data. The authors conclude that the ‘time frontier’ situation implies the same set of characteristics as a ‘physical’ frontier: nonlinearity, mobility, and a superabundance of projects for reformatting the ‘frontier’ locality. For people and places caught up in the situation of this time frontier, not only the future but also the past becomes a project, thus both categories become equally pluralistic. As a result, the location lives ‘outside the present’, outside the projects actually in process, forming a social vacuum: weak ties are destroyed, the resulting vacuum is filled with third-party projects that compete to offer a definition of the locality’s meaning.
K e y w o r d s: open market, informal economy, post-Soviet city, ‘ethnic’ marking, time frontier, urban space.
T o c i t e: Timoshkin D., Grigorichev K., ‘“Non-Place” outside Time: Indeterminacy as the Specificity of the Existence of Localities in a Post-Soviet City (The Case of Irkutsk)’, Forum for Anthropology and Culture, 2019, no. 15, pp. 183–202.
d o i: 10.31250/1815-8927-2019-15-15-183-202
U R L: http://anthropologie.kunstkamera.ru/files/pdf/eng015/timoshkin_grigorichev.pdf
183 A R T I C L E S
Dmitriy Timoshkin, Konstantin Grigorichev
‘Non-Place’ outside Time: Indeterminacy as the Specificity of the Existence of localities in a Post-Soviet City (The Case of Irkutsk)
The article considers the condition of one of the quarters in the centre of Irkutsk that can be called a ‘time frontier’. This refers to the exclusion of this urban locality from the present time. The place in question has ended up on the border between various projects of the future and the past. This affects not only its architectural appearance, but also its social content. The authors seek to understand whether this situation is reported in the stories told by people who find themselves in the context of the ‘border’ locality, and whether this affects the architectural and social appearance of the post-Soviet city. The study is based on materials of participant observation — the results of ‘strolling’ in Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of that term — and nonformalised interviews. Michel de Certeau’s dichotomy of ‘strategy-tactics’ and Henri Lefebvre’s concept of spatiality have been employed in the processing and conceptualisation of the data. The authors conclude that the ‘time frontier’ situation implies the same set of characteristics as a ‘physical’ frontier: nonlinearity, mobility, and a superabundance of projects for reformatting the ‘frontier’ locality. For people and places caught up in the situation of this time frontier, not only the future but also the past becomes a project, thus both categories become equally pluralistic. As a result, the location lives ‘outside the present’, outside the projects actually in process, forming a social vacuum: weak ties are destroyed, the resulting vacuum is filled with third-party projects that compete to offer a definition of the locality’s meaning.
Keywords: open market, informal economy, post-Soviet city, ‘ethnic’ marking, time frontier, urban space.
Change is an integral part of urban life, but in a situation of social crisis changes manifest themselves more evidently and dynamically . The transformations of Russian post-Soviet cities took place against a background of the disappearance of the state monopoly on physical and symbolic violence [Volkov 2012: 12], which led to the appearance of a large number of new operators who could project and bring about their own ideas of the past, present and future of one or another urban locality . Whereas changes in Soviet cities had been limited by the central planning authorities and by ideo-logically imposed notions of what the past and future ‘ought to be’, now these limits had been largely removed . In the ‘memory wars’ that took place as a result, processes that had previously gone on secretly or had been regarded as evident norms rose to the surface .
In Soviet cities swift changes had taken place when for one reason or another whole districts were rebuilt . The difference is that the ‘hard history’ of Soviet towns existed in a context of denied histories, whose marginal status
Dmitriy Timoshkin Irkutsk State University, Laboratory for Historical and Political Demography 1 Karla Marksa Str., Irkutsk, Russia / National Research Tomsk State University, Laboratory for Social and Anthropological Research 34 Lenina Av., Tomsk, Russia [email protected]
Konstantin Grigorichev Irkutsk State University, Laboratory for Historical and Political Demography 1 Karla Marksa Str., Irkutsk, Russia / National Research Tomsk State University, Laboratory for Social and Anthropological Research 34 Lenina Av., Tomsk, Russia [email protected]
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was maintained by the state, and of the only possible ‘correct’ future . While the changes in a Soviet town took place within the framework of the realisation of a state-supported project, in the post-Soviet period there was a whole range of ‘correct’ histories, and the realisation of one or another future was basically limited by the capabilities of the persons or groups interested in it .
The changes that happened to Soviet cities were regularly reflected in their visual and social content [Lefebvre 1991: 62] the architecture changed in parallel with the transformation of the social structure, the habitual trajectories of everyday routes were abolished and new ones created . Changes in a Soviet city followed Bauman’s pre-modern logic [Bauman 2000: 4–5]: changes from state to state, the time each change took being more or less limited and corresponding to the moment of a rise in the historical dynamic, the ‘tide’ in Braudel’s terminology [Braudel 1985: 31] . As the range of possible futures widened, change became more or less the only constant in the city space, introducing liquid modernity into it [Bauman 2000: 119–20] .
Changes are visualised through the appearance of new city localities or the radical change of old ones . At first sight this seems like a new state of the locality, whereas in fact we are dealing not with a state, but with a process . In other words, here we can discover what lies between states, a continual ‘liquidity of modernity’, a sort of ‘temporal frontier’ . In this case the past and future of the place and its inhabitants are blurred and obscured because of the number of competing projects . One key characteristic that defined and limited the transformation of a Soviet city was the quite strict regulation of space and time . The situation of a temporal frontier appears at the point when the function of time as a mechanism of social control [Giddens 1984: 17] breaks down, or rather when the monopoly on its realisation does . The removal of these limitations leads to the simultaneous coexistence of many social times and spaces, which may be completely unconnected with each other, and may contradict each other . The result is what John Urry has called the compression of time and space [Urry 2000: 127] .
We shall examine the moment of acceleration of change at the microlevel: how an unstable social state [Blyakher 2005] manifests itself in the form and content of an urban locality using a small district in the middle of Irkutsk as an example . Assuming that the social crisis in the postsocialist city was one of the most important reasons for ‘liquid modernity’ [Bauman 2000], we would like to find out how the situation of the temporal frontier manifests itself in the visual appearance of space and people’s movement trajectories .
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tsk) Our task was to describe the changes taking place in the district
and understand the inner logic of these processes until the situation of indeterminacy was over . In practice it is another attempt to answer Lefebvre’s question about the nature of space as such and urban space in particular . Accepting the assertion that a space, including an urban space, is also the subjective experience and representation of it [Lefebvre 1991: 298], we suggest that it is also the statement that pins down that experience . Let us consider the situation when change is characterised as the essence of urban space . In describing our case, we proffer the idea of a temporal frontier as a viewpoint for examining change as the modus vivendi of the post-Soviet city .
The research was carried out using the method of participant observation, flânerie in Walter Benjamin’s sense [Benjamin 1968] . In addition, we make use of twenty informal interviews collected in the course of three projects . The first of these (2014–8) was on the open markets of Irkutsk, some of which are situated near the district that interests us . We talked to stallholders and shoppers, asked them about the origin of their wares, the social structure of the market, the ordinary routes through it, and the interaction of groups . The second project (2017) was organised by the Centre for Independent Social Research and Education (Irkutsk) . One of the authors, who took part in it, conducted unstructured interviews with residents of districts next to the open markets . The subject of the interviews was the social and infrastructure problems and potential of the territory and its interaction with the neighbouring market . The third project (2017) was devoted to an analysis of the survival practices of communities of street children at the Irkutsk open market and was not directly connected to the subject of this article . However, a number of subjects in the interviews are also relevant to the problem being examined . For processing and conceptualising the material we used Michel de Certeau’s dichotomy between strategy and tactics and Henri Lefebvre’s understanding of space .
From a Soviet suburb to the ‘memory wars’
We chose for our research a small district in the middle of Irkutsk, which is next to the ‘Shanghai’ market, which came into being spontaneously . The district is situated between two streets, Kommunarov Str . and Podgornaya Str ., and the buildings are living accommodation, most of them examples of the architecture of the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries . On the third side it is bounded by the precincts of the Church of the Elevation of the Holy Cross, on the other side of which is one of the largest social spaces in Irkutsk, the ‘130th District’ with
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its concentration of restaurants and cafés and a large shopping centre .
The district’s other neighbour is the Central Park of Culture and Rest (Russian TsPKiO) . Before the revolution this was a cemetery, but then it was closed and the park was built, as they say, ‘on the bones’ . Alongside the old gravestones there were a small zoo, kebab stalls, and the ‘Cipollino’ funfair . The rides were later removed, and what we have now is a rather neglected park with gravel paths, rusty lamps that do not work, partly cleaned gravestones and the remains of the funfair . Beside the park fence there is the recently restored cemetery church and a half-demolished monument to the heroes of the revolution .
Despite the high value of land and the attractiveness of a place in the city centre for developers, the district is derelict . Many of the houses here are abandoned or burnt, and there is no sewerage or piped water . The fences that surround it are cluttered with rubbish thrown from passing cars . The place has a reputation of being marginal and dangerous, and people avoid it even in daylight .
This district has been at the centre of attention for several urban renewal projects at once . Each has had an immediate effect on the visual aspect and social structure of the space described . At present not one of the projects has been brought to completion, and their promoters are in competition with each other, arguing over the place’s possible future and past . The district is effectively ‘stuck’ between several projects, and it is a matter of time when one of the variants of past and future will finally be realised and the situation of indeterminacy will end . This locality has for its whole history been in a way a borderland separating several functional zones in the central part of the city . In pre-Soviet times it separated the Soldatskaya sloboda [Soldiers’ Quarter], with its motley population (the urban lower middle class, ex-servicemen, boy soldiers), public houses and maisons de tolérance from the territory of the Church of the Elevation of the Holy Cross and the cemetery . In Soviet times the place became the border between the ‘clean’ central districts, the slum areas of badly run-down privately-owned housing, and the public space of the TsPKiO . The frontier situation of the locality was emphasised by its topography: its properties were situated on a hillside, with the cemetery at the top and the residential and business districts of the city centre beginning at the bottom .
One important peculiarity of the place is the way its space is organised so as to permit forms of coexistence more typical of the countryside than of urban districts with their many-storeyed buildings . Formerly there used to be large properties here with both houses and domestic offices . This is still reflected in the locals’
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e of
Irku
tsk) vocabulary: the unit of space here is not called a house or a flat, but
an enclosure . In the 1920s the properties began to change: several families were housed within a single ‘enclosure’, and new houses were built . The result was the appearance of improvised fenced-in ‘mini-quarters’, with several householders living in each . At the same time, the district did not reproduce a proper rural environment, but remained closer to the suburbanised space of a Soviet city [Glazychev 1995] .
In the interviews, the district was described as having been until the beginning of the 1990s a peaceful, patriarchal place with a system of stable social relationships and family ties . This system was fixed in the district’s spatial organisation, with a network of paths that cut across the formal boundaries of properties and households . Neighbouring families moved around the district along these paths, and children from different ‘enclosures’ played on common football pitches, and, in other words, the ‘enclosures’ were united by many social and spatial routes .
The new neighbour of the district was the ‘Chinese’ market, which came into being at the beginning of the 1990s, and grew rapidly, forming a space that is designated in urban narratives and academic texts by the collective name of ‘Shankhayka’ .1 This name did not mean so much a particular locality in the centre of Irkutsk as its special condition: respondents might mention other ‘shankhayki’ in other cities and even other countries, having in mind the exoticism of a chaotic social condition .2 Gradually there appeared an infra-structure to serve the many informal networks that provide for the market’s uninterrupted functioning [Dyatlov, Kuznetsov 2004] . The market became a magnet for the urban communities, and, as one of the respondents said, ‘Everyone in Irkutsk got their food there .’ ‘Shankhayka’ is an integral part of the idea of ‘post-Soviet’ Irkutsk, one of its exotic sights and to a significant extent a mechanism of its transformation into a ‘post-Soviet’ city .
The appearance of the ‘Chinese’ market was one or the reasons why the situation of a temporal frontier came about beside it . The district began to be directly and indirectly included in the orbit of the activities of ‘Shankhayka’ . Houses and properties were rented out to accommodate the market infrastructure — containers, storehouses, hostels, illegal restaurants . For almost twenty years the district’s space was overflowing with people and incidents connected with the ‘Chinese’ market . In 2014 the market was closed and transferred
1 ‘Shankhayka’ is ‘Shanghai’ with a Russian suffix that forms both feminine and diminutive derivative [Eds.].
2 Cf. locals’ reference to the run-down and disreputable Apraksin Dvor / Aprashka in St Petersburg as a ‘Shanghai’ [Eds.].
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to the edge of the city, which led to the ‘market’ infrastructure’s leaving the district and which, in fact, determined the frontier situation . The district was deserted, and various renewal projects constructing its past and future attempted to fill the void .
Here one can observe a situation which is the opposite of that described by Pierre Nora: ‘Accélération de l’histoire . Au-delà de la métaphore, il faut prendre la mesure de ce que l’expression signifie: un basculement de plus en plus rapide dans un passé définitivement mort, la perception globale de toute chose comme disparue — une rupture d’équilibre’ [Acceleration of history . Over and above the metaphorical status of the phrase, one must assess what it actually means: a more and more rapid retreat to a past that is definitively dead, a global perception of everything as vanished — a rupture of equilibrium] [Nora 1997: 23] . The past becomes a pretext for choosing one variant of the future . Since land in this area is quite highly priced, the district, like the open market beside it, inevitably attracts the attention of the ‘strategists’ [de Certeau 1990: 59] — the different groups who have the ability to define the content of urban space .
Among these may be included religious activists, who see the place as a continuation of the memorial cemetery and the approach to religious buildings . They connect all the positive changes that have taken place in the district over recent years (primarily the asphalting of Kommunarov Str .) with the restoration of the church and the renewal of its activity . Another group represent the ‘Irkutskie kvartaly’ project, linked to the city authorities [Kozmin 2015; Mayarenkov 2015], who want to see a combination of an open-air museum and a residential quarter . Other ‘strategists’ include the businessmen who want to acquire the land with a view to subsequent resale . Another group whose presence — and to no lesser extent, whose absence — has determined the content of the space of the district are those who are interested in the functioning of the market . And finally there is a group which is also at the centre of events but, unlike the others, has had hardly any means of constructing the district’s everyday life — the residents .
It should be said that all these groups are identified in an extremely provisional manner . It is quite hard to identify the subjects who influence the territory at all clearly, because of their informal status and the multitude of illegal practices: every group has its secret and conflicting interests . A large part of the district was used to service the neighbouring market, but it is practically impossible to determine who exactly the subject influencing that process was . Moreover, it is sometimes hard to understand the consequences that a particular group or individual’s realisation of their project will lead to . Thus when the group connected to the city administration announced
189 A R T I C L E SDm
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appearance, the place proved attractive to business . It is already possible to see how huge buildings built according to the tastes of private persons and not reflecting the architectural appearance of the district supported by the promoters of the project are replacing the old wooden houses .
In this way the interests of many groups with different ideas of what the past and future of this place should be, and very unequal opportunities for realising their ideas, have come together at this place . The district has become a debatable space, the status of which is determined by a vision of the ‘genuine’ past and the ‘right’ future . But in the process it has lost its present . Each of the neighbouring territories, as an ongoing or completed project, is expanding into the space we have described, the content of which remains indeterminate . Several probable projects of the future are proposed for the district: a site of memory, a closed elite residential estate, a public space, a continuation of the Jerusalem cemetery park — and the ‘memory wars’ are declared in this empty space .
The problem is complicated by the collision here of two hardly compatible circumstances: the city authorities’ aim to ‘preserve its history’ and the proximity of the market, which came into being spontaneously and is permeated by a multitude of informal networks . In reality the market introduced — or at least intensified — the conflict between the stasis of the suburb, reinforced by the municipal project for the preservation of the city’s history, and spontaneity, the chaotic movement of the open market . This conflict is manifesting itself even now in the district’s external appearance, and noticeably accelerating the process of the demolition of old houses . The appearance of the open market beside it gave many of the local residents the long-awaited opportunity to leave the insalubrious private sector (even if it was in the city centre), and turn their property, burdened with the status of a listed building, into money .
The district began to turn into a temporary car park, into an extension of the market both for the traders, who rented the old wooden houses as storehouses or temporary accommodation, and for the few local residents who were left . The appearance of big business here meant that any house, particularly one belonging to residents who had not yet managed to privatise their property, could be burnt down, and the residents themselves were constantly being approached by speculators offering to buy their house and land . However, among the long-established residents there are some who are trying to resist the present state of affairs, and continue to live in the district on principle . They are few in number; the rest are
190FORUM FOR ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURE 2019 No 15
simply those who are unable to move . Among those who remain here of their own free will, there are some who refuse to move even when they are given housing in another district . Among the reasons that move them to cling to this rather neglected spot they allege the memory of the past, good conditions for horticulture, reluctance to leave the land, and also the district’s convenient location . It may be supposed that it is nevertheless the memory that comes first . Practically everyone who has remained told his / her story about his / her ancestors who lived here, the legend that connects him / her to this place .
Fires between past and future
The situation of the district is distantly reminiscent of the dichotomy between the ‘White City’ of settler-built Tel Aviv and the ‘Black City’ of working-class / Palestinian Jaffa which Sharon Rotbard evoked in a recent study [Rotbard 2015] . The city authorities create and maintain the myth that the space is marginal, and thereby justify the harsh methods they use to effect the forcible transformation and subordination of this space to the interests of those groups who have sufficient resources to reshape it . One may suppose that for almost three decades this mechanism of justification has also been used in respect of the ‘Chinese’ market [Timoshkin 2017], inevitably affecting the district .
The appearance of the ‘Chinese’ market, as a number of interviews testify, changed the locality noticeably . The district had always lacked such essential elements of modern infrastructure as a centralised water supply and sewerage, which, to put it mildly, made permanent residence here uncomfortable . Therefore many of the local residents were not averse to moving, but only those of them who had managed to register their right of ownership to their house and land were able to do so . The traders often rented houses from the locals together with their land and put up tall fences around them . This blocked the pedestrian routes that had previously connected separate ‘enclosures’ and parallel streets . The space was changing for the outside observer too: the streets began to resemble tunnels made out of whitish-green corrugated iron, and the territory between them became inaccessible and dropped out of the general context of the district .
The inclusion of the district in the market infrastructure led to the emergence of peculiar social spaces there — illegal restaurants and shops with authentic ‘Chinese’ food, which became attractions for both tourists and locals . The district was visited by ‘tourists’ not only from out of town, but from other parts of Irkutsk, attracted by the strikingly different social environment and the aesthetics of an ‘abandoned’, ‘forbidden’, ‘closed’ place .
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made the position of the district unstable . Ever since it first appeared, the market had been an object of constant displeasure to the city authorities . The basic argument in favour of getting rid of it was that it did not correspond to the way the city centre ‘ought to look’ . The problem is not only the projectors’ aesthetic preferences: there are quite a lot of unattractive, neglected places in the middle of Irkutsk, ‘slums’ that look no better than ‘Shankhayka’, if not worse . In addition, the market inevitably gave rise to conflicts between dif-ferent criminal groups who wanted to control the flow of money . This opposition was another reason for drawing up projects for its reconfiguration . It is possible that the ‘ethnic’ markedness of the place also had an effect (‘slums’ were bad enough, but these were ‘not even ours’) . A combination of these factors seems the most likely reason for the constant attacks on ‘Shankhayka’ . After many fruitless attempts, these attacks were finally crowned with partial success in 2014 . The market trading was transferred to the edge of the city, and the areas where it had taken place were left empty, and became a battlefield between the partisans of the various projects for rebuilding the place .
The transfer of the ‘Chinese’ market had an immediate effect on the district’s fate . The entrepreneurs who used to rent whole ‘enclosures’ as storehouses abandoned them as useless . The many underground restaurants also disappeared . High land values meant that business, the centre for the preservation of the architectural heritage, and the city authorities, who included it in one regeneration project after another, all tried to monopolise the right to determine the district’s future . At the same time they were in no hurry to take the opportunity to construct its present, and so it was deferred indefinitely .
One has the impression that the district began to die along with the market . The illegal cafés were the only reason the tourists came, and the traders and seasonal migrant workers provided the house-holders with a regular monthly income . Because of difficulties connected with the regulations for using listed buildings, it proved difficult to rent out the properties or sell them . It was similarly hard to repair them and give them a marketable appearance (it required considerable expense), and so most of the houses are now empty . The locals have also noticed a drop in the flow of traffic .
Changes in the quality of the space led to its further marginalisation . In the city narratives the district already figured as a continuation of the open market, an ‘alien’ space that was dangerous for the chance passer-by . Now the local residents perceive it in the same way and feel like ‘foreigners’ . The dark, narrow, dirty streets repel not only
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residents in other districts, who avoid the district, but even the locals, who shelter in their fenced-off houses .
The empty houses are the haunt of homeless people and drug dealers, and some of them have simply burnt down . Fires occur not only because in the cold weather the homeless light bonfires inside wooden houses, but also because of arson . Some local residents who are anxious to move away see insuring the house and then burning it down as their only way out . The announcement of yet another municipal project for restoring the place accelerated this process, and houses began to burn more often . The prospect of profit encourages estate agents and builders (and even some employees of the mayor’s office) to put pressure on the local residents and make them move . When they refuse, it sometimes happens that their house ‘accidentally’ burns down . The respondents complain that they cannot get a good night’s sleep for fear of arson . And the people from the city administration are no less feared than the speculators: some of the neighbours who had not managed to privatise their house and land have already been evicted and moved to small, cheap flats on the edge of the city . Many of the houses are surrounded by surveillance cameras and have guard dogs in the yard .
The prices offered persistently by speculators for a house are not enough to buy a house or flat in the centre: the minimal price offered here for a house and its land is 900,000 roubles . If the respondents are to be believed, a new log house with a plot of land in the same locality was on the market for 17,000,000 roubles . One hears other figures too: a wooden house where there had been ten fires in the past ten years was restored, painted, provided with all the essential conveniences and offered for sale at over 40,000,000 roubles .
One way or another, the fires have led to the disappearance of some of the open homesteads that were left here . Large private detached houses or office blocks have risen from the ashes . ‘Enclosures’ that have been burnt down and rebuilt drop out of the context of the district: the new buildings are surrounded by high fences and barbed wire, blocking the usual routes by which people moved about . The rumour of a renewal project in preparation makes it impossible to carry it out: new buildings erected with a view to resale do not fit into the concept of projects supposed to ‘restore the historic appearance’ of the district . And today, even though ‘Shankhayka’ has gone, most of the district is still surrounded by solid fences . Behind them, against a background of abandoned and burnt-out houses, washing is drying on the branches and children are playing . Here and there building work is going on . It is easy to trace visually which parts of the district were ‘assimilated’ by the market: there are the former cafés,
193 A R T I C L E SDm
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tsk) warehouses and ‘chufanki’1 — small and often illegal ‘Chinese’
snack bars [Dyatlova 2015] .
The departure of the market has also affected the density of traffic . Respondents most often associated the district’s past with the excessive numbers of cars and pedestrians, unlike today, when there are only cars . The attempts to achieve a monopoly on the place’s future have perhaps had an even greater effect on the district’s fate than the proximity of the market . Despite the large number of projects for regenerating the place (according to our respondents, about once every five or six years sociologists go over the district with a fine toothcomb), not one of them has so far gone beyond the stage of planning, nice pictures, and fires .
When one reconstructs the history of the district from the respondents’ stories, one can see how the local community fell apart (if there ever was one here) . People who were used to living on the land and knowing many of their neighbours by sight were relocated to newly-built high-rise flats on the edge of the city at Novolenino and Lugovoe . As a result some families, relocated from a ‘border’ district marked as marginal, found themselves surrounded by other ‘marginal’ people relocated from other ‘insalubrious’ neighbourhoods . At present the actual future that is coming into being in the district seems to be transforming it even more into an excluded space . Against a background of gradually increasing corrugated iron fences and tall detached houses faced with cellular concrete, many projects for the ‘right’ past of this place come into being and into conflict with each other . Projects for the transformation of the district rely on the ‘historic evidence’ of what the city centre ‘really’ used to be, at the same time as it is turning into something completely different .
The variability of the past: A ‘border’ district as a place of the construction of memory
As stated above, the district borders on several localities, each with its own meanings, the present of which is indeterminate, and the past and future of which may have a substantial effect on the material and social content of the district . This refers above all to the Jerusalem Cemetery . Even though there are several groups in the city who have different ideas about the semantic content of this place, the people of the city use it, as before, as a park .
There is a continuing debate in the city community about what the territory next to the district should be called — a memorial park
1 ‘Chufanka’, pl. ‘chufanki’ is a feminine and diminutive derivative formed from ‘chu fang’ with the same Russian suffix as in ‘Shankhayka’ above [Eds.].
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or a memorial cemetery . Churchmen insist that the place should be called the Jerusalem Cemetery, while the experts of ‘Irkutskie kvartaly’ see it as a park . A cemetery does not fit in well with the Irkutsk Commercial Axis project promoted by ‘Irkutskie kvartaly’, which aims to create a single pedestrian zone including many of the commercial and entertainment premises situated in the centre . The group of religious activists sees using a cemetery for any kind of entertainment purposes at all as sacrilege . At the same time it is one of the few places in the centre of Irkutsk where one can take a walk at a distance from the noise of the city . This is what most of the people in the city use it for .
The quarrel between the ‘churchmen’ and the ‘projectors’ may have a direct effect on the content of the district under examination . One of the main entrances to the park is situated in immediate proximity to it . Here there is a small square with several memorial objects . On one side there is the cemetery church, and on the other the base of the monument to the fighters of the revolution (recently sent away for restoration) and a few memorial burials . All this is next to a children’s playground situated between the cemetery / park fence and some houses . Until recently, when the cemetery was called the Funfair, the church building contained a place for hiring skis, a storeroom and a hostel . Then it was fenced off and one fine day reopened as a church .
In parallel with the restoration of the church, on the centenary of the October Revolution, the monument to those who had fought for Revolution was dismantled . But the memorial burials of the leaders of the Red partisan squads known in the city are still in place next to the church . The dismantling of the monument took place peacefully; only representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church expressed the hope that ‘the sculpture of red fighters’ would not return to its previous place . Since the restored church was opened and the steps leading from the park / cemetery towards ‘Shankhayka’ were brought back into use, the people of the city have begun to recover the marginal territory of the district . Now at the weekends one can see expensive cars parked by the church where the monument used to be . The local priest lays a certain reanimation of the district to the church’s credit, remarking that Kommunarov Str ., which bounds it to the south, would hardly have got asphalt and street lighting if it had not been for the Metropolitan, who came to consecrate the church .
Despite the very substantial disagreements between the two projects for renewing the place, they have much more in common that might appear at first sight . The group of religious activists proposes turning the territory into an open-air museum . The park should be a memorial cemetery again, there should be no commercial activities
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tsk) there, and the visual markers of a cemetery — gravestones and
crosses — should reappear .
This would not mean that the cemetery would be a closed area: they plan to lay out pedestrian paths, public spaces for relaxation, and information stands about the lives of the people buried there . Moreover, both ‘Irkutskie kvartaly’ and ‘Irkutskiy nekropol’ are agreed in not regarding the Soviet period, nor the more recent time when there was an open market there, as ‘history’ . These stages are omitted from both projects . For their authors what happened on this territory after 1917 practically does not exist .
For example, in the interview with the priest of the cemetery church, ‘the post-Soviet past’ clearly resounds with life ‘before’ and ‘after’ the project . Talking of his experience of visiting the park, he admits that ‘then’ he saw nothing wrong with taking a ride on the observation wheel or having a kebab, not knowing that it was ‘really’ a cemetery . Now the priest views such activities in that place as unacceptable and is engaging in a polemic with those citizens who prefer to use the park in its ‘former’ sense as a place of relaxation . In essence, the physical content of the park is the same as it was, but now it is supposed to serve as a place that reminds us of death and the vanity of existence, in counterbalance to the neighbouring localities such as the open market and its ‘sales’ . The priest sees the removal of the monument to the revolutionaries as a symbolic act which underlines the fact of the redefinition of the place’s semantic content . For him this redefinition means a certain renaissance after the Soviet period of ‘destruction’, which led to disownment and marginalisation . Now, after the ‘restoration’ of its ‘historical meaning’, the place is beginning to live again: the flow of parishioners comes to the church, women and children go for walks along the asphalted Kommunarov Str ., and townsfolk gather every day on the restored steps . In this logic the previous period of history is practically effaced, since it does not fit in with the project for the future .
Both projects are directed towards the creation of a simulacrum derived from a generalised notion of the ‘proper’ content of the city centre . A mass of historical evidence is urged in support of both, in the form of photographs and the words of eye-witnesses . However, at present the projects are far from being realised: the park, and the neighbourhood next to it, and the territory of ‘Shankhayka’ are still used for purposes other than those ascribed to them in the projects . Instead of restoration there are fires, instead of the renewal of the architectural heritage private houses are being erected, and the local residents are sometimes unable to repair the fence round their property because it is listed .
The main reasons why the townsfolk come to this district are cheap eating places, groceries and household goods, and easy accessibility .
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The territory’s ‘ethnic’ marking makes the stratification of projects visible . The former association of the brand and toponym ‘Shankhayka’ with all things Chinese is principally in evidence in the name of the big new shopping centre, to which part of the street trade has been transferred — ‘Shanghai City Mall’ . On a high metal fence hangs a banner inviting people to travel to shop at another shopping centre — ‘Chinatown’ . Beside these signs there are dozens of smaller ones belonging to small restaurants, cafés, and tea-houses, which are generally designated as ‘Muslim’: they use the colour green, have signs saying ‘100% halal’, are named after places in Central Asia, etc . The ethnically marked food court has become the ‘third place’ for immigrants, who relax here in the tea-houses with their whole families on their days off, and for occasional tourists who enter the cafés for a taste of the ‘exotic’, and for the rest of the townsfolk, lured by good, cheap food .
The only past that legitimises this ‘immigrant’ / ‘ethnic’ food court are the post-Soviet projects of the 1990s, embodied in Irkutsk as the ‘big Shanghai’ . Outside the context of this short period, of which the city strategists take no notice when they construct the ‘right’ past, all this exoticism is nothing more than a symbol of the ‘occupation’ of the historic centre by migrants from other countries . The expulsion of the immigrant market and its infrastructure to the edge of the city requires the expulsion of the corresponding section of the past from the memory .
The experience of the realisation of other urban projects (such as the ‘130th District’ [Grigoryeva, Meerovich 2013]) allows it to be supposed that in future there will be no room for the ‘immigrant’ food court between the park / cemetery and the elite commercial district that may later come into being . Thereby those meanings that have existed since the beginning of the market — low prices, exoticism, a mechanism for overcoming the social crisis — will be excluded from the urban context . The process of their exclusion is already visible through the layering of contexts: alongside the tea-houses and amateur museums there are fashionable hairdressing salons, hostels and glass-and-concrete commercial centres, brightly and tastelessly decorated . The new spaces of ‘modernity’ infringe upon the borders of the district, destroying the fences that used to separate the pedestrian zone from the market infrastructure, which was by and large illegal . In this way ‘modernity’ expels the chaos and constant change of the market, replacing the trading grounds with static buildings and thereby doing away with the place’s recent past .
Whichever project wins, the district will become an extension either of the park / cemetery, or of the elite commercial zone, or of both . However, at present none of the existing projects for regenerating
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tsk) the territory of the market and the neighbouring district takes
account of the last thirty years’ histories of the place, which appear as something shameful, or at least not worth mentioning . The restoration only of the pre-Soviet context means a rejection of a whole block of memory connected with Soviet and post-Soviet times .
The narratives of the local residents, from which the category of the ‘here and now’ is practically absent (as is any future) are telling . The past remains the only more or less stable structure . Their own ‘past’ is used as an argument to resist the administration and the speculators: ‘We’ve been living here since [19]73;’ ‘my grandmother lived here .’ The historical ‘past’ as a means of underlining the significance of the place’s content: ‘This is a historic building, a merchant used to live here, and just look what an awful state it’s in;’ ‘we’re not leaving here, it’s our history, we’ve even found shrapnel from Kolchak’s shells here, Kolchak has been here .’1
It is through the past that the old inhabitants construct their connection with the place . A knowledge of local legends and ‘history’ presupposes their privileged position in comparison with other groups who dispute their right to ownership of this territory . This right, judging by the interviews, also exists only in the past . Some of the respondents, despite not wanting to leave, stress the hopelessness of attempts to remain . Even though the house and the land formally belong to them, people do not regard the land as ‘theirs’ . It was in the past, when previous generations of their families lived here . Most of the respondents find it hard to describe the project for the future; as one of them put it, ‘What sort of future can there be here, if there is no present?’
The district’s past, like its future, is variable . On the one hand, the space is obviously connected with the ‘Soviet’ period: this is evinced by the local legends, and by the street names, and even by the way it looks (rusty Soviet cars abandoned by the roadside or standing in the ‘enclosures’) . The territory ends at the burial place of the ‘heroes of the revolution’ and the square named after them . On the other hand, elements of pre-Soviet history are represented, mostly in the local legends . Like ‘Shankhayka’, the district’s post-Soviet past is ignored by the projects for its future and preserved only in the stories its people tell, included in the context of the space .
The processes of change of the meanings of the space and the construction of its past and future have led to the frontier position of the district and of ‘Shankhayka’ being visualised through
1 Admiral Alexander Kolchak (1874–1920) was leader of the anti-Bolshevik forces in Siberia, and acting head of state for the Provisional Government in 1918–20. Vilified in the Soviet period, he has been promoted since the late 1980s as a national hero [Eds.].
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the contrasting proximity of Cadillacs and burnt-out wooden hostels, new detached houses surrounded by barbed wire and those enclosures that remain, ‘100% halal’ and ‘Shanghai’ . The borderland is embodied in huge fences that conceal emptiness, concrete areas and waste ground on which a future so far uncontrolled by the municipality is gradually growing up . Even the most deep-rooted of the local residents are prepared to be forced to move by the realisation of one or another of the projects . Long years of war with the authorities, with the heritage preservation agencies, and with enterprising dealers have accustomed them to the thought that their future does not depend on them, and even that this place has no future . Instead of a present they have found themselves in a borderland situation between a multiple past and an indefinite future .
Conclusion
The position described in this article of an urban district could be viewed through the idea of a temporal frontier — as the exclusion of an urban locality from the present . The district has proved a space in which different projects for the future and constructs of the past are in competition, and this is expressed in its architectural appearance, the means of constructing its images, and the trajectories of people’s movement .
The situation of a temporal frontier, in our opinion, presupposes the same set of characteristics as a ‘physical’ borderland, for example that between town and country . ‘The frontier is understood as a non-linear, moveable border, a zone of assimilation, of a reformatting by the town “in its own image” of the economic and sociocultural space of the country, replacing the former strict demarcation between these spaces’ [Grigorichev 2013: 431] . In this case the situation is more involved: since there is no single point of departure (a generally accepted understanding of the past and future), the frontier’s motion is along many vectors . For a space in the situation of a temporal frontier, it is not only the future, but the past that becomes a project, and thus both categories prove equally pluralistic: there may be as many projects for the past as there are for the future, and one project may be based on another .
The trouble is that in a situation of timelessness both the object and subject are fugitive . The locality itself remains unstructured, or rather it starts living in many structures at the same time, some of them already demolished, as in our case the infrastructure of the open market, and some existing only as projects . The locality includes some spaces with a limited set of functions, like a private kinder-garten or a huge residential ‘palace’, but these are clearly separated from the rest of the district, and only emphasise its chaotic nature .
199 A R T I C L E SDm
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y as
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of t
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xist
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of
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a P
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e of
Irku
tsk) The space for realising private projects is inexorably shrinking, and
this can clearly be traced in interviews with people who are experiencing this sort of state here and now . The range of projects for transforming the space is not limited by ideological frameworks, but is determined by the existence of the resources for carrying them out — connections with the city administration and the agencies of power, and money .
Respondents who live in this borderland speak of the impossibility of realising individual projects for lack of the necessary resources . This makes them the hostages of those projects whose promoters have such resources . In such a situation of sharply increasing complexity and speed of change, the local residents are deprived of the right to have their say . Their past and future become variable, and they cannot influence them, and are left paralysed . At the same time collective projects also turn out to be fragmented and their consequences unpredictable . In the context of one project a number of others may arise, but their development and possible results are not examined by the creators of the first project . In a certain sense it is the frontier situation itself that becomes the subject .
The case described offers in our opinion considerable interest as a clear example of the transformation and redefinition of urban space — a process which in most cases can only be considered in the conditional mood . This transformation is taking place so quickly that visible changes happen over a few years, months, even weeks . The processes of forming the urban space in the opposition of strategies and tactics, the production of space, the destruction and formation of communities described by Henri Lefebvre [Lefebvre 1991], Michel de Certeau [de Certeau 1990] and Jane Jacobs [Jacobs 1961] are embodied in the logic of the frontier here and now . The present of the urban space turns from the ‘hard body’ of history into the ‘liquidity of modernity’ [Bauman 2000]: motion and change here are not mechanisms for the replacement of conditions, but stable values .
It may be observed how the discussion about the content of the territory of an urban district affects its physical content, and the fates of the people connected with it . One of the markers of the ‘extra-temporal’ condition of space is that the local inhabitants have become accustomed to the regular visits of sociologists and to persistent proposals to buy their land and threats to burn their houses down . Interviews with them allow the formation of an idea of life between unrealised projects for the future and a dying past, and visual observation an understanding of how this process influences the ‘scenery’: the buildings and the streets . The competition between the projects for developing the city centre demonstrates an undeclared ‘memory war’ [Shnirelman 2003] for the right
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to determine the content of urban locations and the layer of the city’s history which will be represented there .
The case analysed allows us to see the interconnection between the transformation of urban space and the competition between projects for the past and future . The town planners’ projects for transforming urban spaces prove to be closely linked to the conflicts which arise between the proposed variants of the future of those places and the constructs of the past that legitimise them . An ‘inconvenient’ or ‘incorrect’ semantic load and the architectural landscape that provides for it are expelled to the edge of the town, and the history that legitimises it to the edge of memory . In turn, the expulsion of significant circumstances and sections of history from legitimate memory entails a loss of the contexts of existence of some or other urban spaces, which leads to their gradual disappearance . In the case when the excluded spaces and memory are connected with trauma (like the 1990s for Russian society), the situation of the temporal frontier becomes particularly dramatic and dynamic .
Another thing that seems important is that the case that we have described is not unique . Even a cursory glance at the territory of Irkutsk from the proposed viewpoint will reveal many localities which have ‘fallen out’ of the present and exist on the border between projects for the future and constructs of the past . There are also such cases, to judge by material from the media, in other cities . It is enough to remember the ‘explosive’ news events connected with the renovation of Moscow or the whole districts that have burnt down in other towns in western Russia . Markets appear and disappear, new actors come and go to determine the city space . Each such episode leads to a change of the trajectories, fates and visual components of Russian cities . And each can produce an analogous situation of timelessness .
Acknowledgments
The study was carried out within the main part of the state assignment of the Ministry of Education and Science of Russia (the project ‘Discursive Mechanisms of Border Design in the Heterogeneous Society of Eastern Russia’, task no . 28 .9753 .2017 / 8 .9) and partially (analysis of migrant settlement practices in the area of influence of ‘ethnic’ markets) was supported by a grant of the Russian Science Foundation (project no . 18-18-00293) .
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Translated by Ralph Cleminson