THE POLITICS OF SPACE, SOCIALIST URBANISM AND TRANSFORMATIONS: ANALYSIS OF KRYVYI RIH ADMINISTRATIVE CENTER CHANGES

Abstract

The urban spaces in Ukraine have been dynamically changed over the past decades, and the politics of space has also been transformed as a result of the changing imaginations on different types of the production of space – the socialist and the market one. During the transition period, the ideology of spatial development and politics that determine the goals, priorities and regulations in urban development have changed dramatically; as well as institutions and actors involved in the production of space. Thus, we observe today the process of not only physical transformations of urban areas, but also notions of them, priorities for their development, specific purposes, functions and regulation of their changes, spatial organization and its concepts, public involvement in the planning of urban areas. Post-socialist transition, in fact, denotes two completely different ways of producing the space – the socialist and the postsocialist. In this paper, we analyze the politics of space and spatial transformations, illustrating spatial restructurings through the changes of socio-political context - ideologies, institutions, actors and tools that shape it. We suggest that changes in the ways of the production of space and shifting from socialist to postsocialist urbanism are related specifically to the changes of these key dimensions. We consider the idea of Kryvyi Rih administrative center development through the several planning projects from the early 1930s (in relation to planning the socialist city in Kryvyi Rih) until the end of the 1980s (when project was partly implemented) in order to highlight the socialist urbanism as a spatial, social and ideological phenomenon. We analyze this urban space through the lens of socialism and post-socialist transition to illustrate how it transformed spatially, functionally and conceptually.