Individually Generated Building Modifications in Response to Housing Precarity
Read this post in Ukrainian here.
We face a global housing crisis; housing precarity is ubiquitous around the world. Institutional policies often fall short, driving residents to create makeshift solutions to the lack of affordable housing. However, while community-generated changes in shared spaces are praised as placemaking, private modifications, especially those in apartment blocks, are ignored or condemned. So why do we admire public initiatives to solve housing insecurity and neglect private efforts to improve housing conditions?
Comprehensive literature on individually generated change is nearly non-existent, a rare exception being Graham Tipple’s twenty-year-old Extending Themselves: User-Initiated Transformations of Government-Built Housing in Developing Countries. Community-generated change, in contrast, is popular among practitioners and scholars alike.[1] Academic and policy discourse praises collective grass-roots interventions at the urban scale, calling it DIY urbanism, guerilla urbanism, or placemaking, while small, household-scale modifications rarely get the attention they deserve. This is despite the fact that individually generated housing modifications are (a) extremely popular among urbanites globally, (b) beneficial in the context of limited housing mobility, be it because of the housing market, segregation, or absence of housing programs and, (c) immensely helpful in improving living conditions in the context of housing precarity.[2]
Figure 1. Apartment remodeling, Kyiv, Ukraine 2019. Photograph by Kateryna Malaia.
Of course, individually generated changes and extensions can violate construction codes, and endanger entire buildings. Yet, at the scale of an individual household, they can also increase footage, efficiency, and comfort, improving the quality of life. The reason for scant scholarly consideration resides primarily in the scale of inquiry: a partition wall or enclosed balcony is too small to be recognized for its impact on housing conditions. On the grand urban scale such changes are invisible and housing supply seemingly remains the same.
In this essay I discuss the manner in which small-scale home modifications were undertaken to improve living conditions in post-Soviet cities, in the context of a non-existent housing market and attendant low housing mobility.[3] Such modifications are found throughout urban centers in the post-Soviet region, suggesting that they were not just a local method of addressing housing market issues, but rather a common response to housing precarity.
“attention to the small-scale private modifications . . . enables us to see housing precarity differently”
The USSR started with a severe housing shortage and suffered from a perpetual housing crisis. To solve it, the state seized housing, abolished private property, and imposed “compaction” of existing housing down to nine square meters and less than a room per person. In communal apartments, bathrooms and kitchens were to be shared between unrelated families. Although this helped house growing urban populations, it was hardly a successful policy, since it required both brutal housing requisitions and extreme living conditions. Even in the 1980s, urban residents in Soviet cities still remained inadequately housed, with some families living in barracks and communal apartments, and others in newly built, but overcrowded, mass-constructed homes.[4]
After the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, state-controlled housing distribution ceased. Urbanites received the right to purchase or rent housing, but most of them could not afford to take this opportunity. Instead, they utilized the only way they could to improve their housing conditions: apartment remodeling (Figure 1).
Figure 2. (a) Before re-planning and (b, c) re-planning options for a two-room apartment from I-510 apartment building series (c. 1957-1969). Copyright Kateryna Malaia.
Two-room apartments comprised the largest proportion of post-Soviet urban housing stock (around 41% in the Russian Federation).[5] These apartments usually housed three or more residents, since in the USSR people had to always outnumber rooms by at least one. Before 1991, a family of three—two parents and a child—could have at most a two-room home. A room that was used for sleeping at night would become a living room, an office, a nursery, and a dining room during daytime (Figure 2a).
Between the late 1980s and 2000s, apartment remodeling swept post-Soviet cities: urban residents considered remodeling a sign of comfortable economic standing. Besides regular remodeling, many urbanites re-planned their apartment layouts by taking down, building, or otherwise modifying partition and load-bearing walls. For example, in mid-century two-room prefabricated apartments, where one of the rooms was often a walk-through, large families often chose to build a new partition wall creating a hallway, which turned a former walk-through room into two separate spaces. This meant that two generations or nuclear families could each occupy one room, without being in each other’s way. Such rooms would provide private sleeping spaces, while social functions would either be shared between them equally or relocated to the kitchen. For the average post-Soviet adult, who had never had a private bedroom before, this gave unprecedented control over their personal time and space (Figure 2b).
Conversely, small families could take down the partition wall between the kitchen and the walk-through room to enlarge the tiny kitchen space—sixty-nine square feet on average in early prefabricated housing—and create a dining area for both everyday eating and special occasions (Figure 2c).
Figure 3. User-modified balconies in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine, 2019. Photograph by Kateryna Malaia.
Figure 4. User-modified balconies in Kyiv, Ukraine, 2019. Photograph by Kateryna Malaia.
User-generated changes located in public view—balcony and loggia enclosures, and, especially, new extensions built onto existing apartment blocks—received the most severe official criticism (Figures 3, 4, and 5).[6] Such balcony extension or repurposing is a global practice—from Chandigarh to Tbilisi to Cairo, and typically municipalities consider these problematic.[7] Yet, despite violating building codes and breaking the visual unity of apartment buildings, balcony enclosures provide extra storage, temperature and sound insulation, while extensions add useful footage to apartments.
Figure 5. User-modified balconies in Kyiv, Ukraine, 2019. Photograph by Kateryna Malaia.
Individual housing modifications, especially if done without proper expertise, are not a panacea. However, given growing global housing insecurity, user-generated changes in multi– and single-unit housing deserve our consideration. Turning our attention to the small-scale private modifications in residential architecture enables us to see housing precarity differently. Indeed, there is much to be learned from such self-help practices.
NOTES
1. Examples of research on community-generated change include works by Jeffrey Hou and Michael Rios, and new comprehensive publications, such as Gordon C.C. Douglas, The Help Yourself City: Legitimacy and Inequality in DIY Urbanism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018) and Mahyar Arefi and Conrad Kickert, eds., Palgrave Handbook of Bottom-Up Urbanism (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).
2. See a research report by Ann Schlyter, Multi-habitation: Urban Housing and Everyday Life in Chitungwiza Zimbabwe (Uppsala: Nordic Africa Institute, 2003); and a cultural history of changing homes Jie Li, Shanghai Homes: Palimpsests of Private Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).
3. Zavisca provides a compelling argument that in the first post-Soviet decade property in the post-Soviet cities existed in the absence of regulated real estate markets. Jane Zavisca, “Property without Markets: Housing Policy and Politics in Post-Soviet Russia,” 1992–2007, Comparative European Politics 6, n. 3 (Sept. 2008), 365-386.
4. Jane R. Zavisca, Housing the New Russia (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2012), 47-48.
5. In the USSR, apartments were categorized by the number of rooms (other than the kitchen, bathroom and hallways), rather than bedrooms.
6. Stefan Bouzarovski, Joseph Salukvadze and Michael Gentile, “A Socially Resilient Urban Transition? The Contested Landscapes of Apartment Building Extensions in Two Post-communist Cities,” Urban Studies 48, n. 13 (Oct. 2011), 2701.
7. In Eastern and Central European context such exceptions can be found in Stefan Bouzarovski, Retrofitting the City: Residential Flexibility, Resilience and the Built Environment (London; New York: I.B. Tauris, 2016) and Oleksandr Burlaka, Balcony Chic (Osnovy: Kyiv, 2019).
