Population shifts and Urban policies in housing estates of Tallinn, Estonia

Abstract

Housing estates in the Tallinn urban region are interesting objects of research in many respects. First, as in other post-socialist European cities, the proportion of the population residing in socialist-era apartments is extraordinarily high here. Second, residential units in housing estates were originally state-built and run but are almost fully privatised today. Third, post-Soviet housing estates tend to be multi-ethnic, much like similar residential districts in many other European cities. This chapter reveals that Tallinn housing estates are experiencing gradual social decline: within the first two decades of post-socialism, a remarkable ageing of the population has taken place, the proportion of people with low socio-economic status has increased dramatically in some estates while others have succeeded in remaining relatively stable in this respect, and patterns of ethnic and socio-economic segregation have increasingly overlapped. Interestingly, this silent social decline is not acknowledged by contemporary urban actors. In the early transition years, institutional rearrangements were made (privatisation, new housing management and urban planning rules), but this was followed by a period of political neglect until the late 2000s. Although recent interventions (e.g. social housing projects, densification of housing estates by private developers, support for the renovation of panel buildings and rising community activism) have been more targeted, these policies remain rather chaotic generally. No vision exists for how the efforts of different actors and sectoral policies should stabilise housing estates in the longer run. There seems to be a race against time—although investments and efforts are being made to improve the residential quality of housing estates, this is not sufficient to counterbalance their ongoing stigmatisation and population changes.