Domestication as Pacification: Public Space Design in Post-Soviet Countries
Domestication as Pacification: Public Space Design in Post-Soviet Countries

Author(s): Jacopo Leveratto
Subject(s): Architecture, Policy, planning, forecast and speculation, Post-War period (1950 - 1989), Transformation Period (1990 - 2010), Present Times (2010 - today), Politics and Identity, Identity of Collectives
Published by: Transnational Press London
Keywords: Post-Soviet countries; public space; design; domestication;
Summary/Abstract: In 2008, a group of young artists led by Stefan Rusu and Vladimir Us and supported by the Oberliht Association and the European Cultural Foundation pioneered an original intervention for the rehabilitation of a dilapidated esplanade located in front of the Council’s Department of Culture in Chişinău, the capital of Moldova. The efforts started with the idea of building a new urban identity for a civic area that was formerly dominated by representations of power or advertising, to restore the sense of a real public space that could be different from the one imposed by the central government. The group, then, studied a permanent installation meant to represent both a catalyst for the artistic events of the city and a trigger for active processes of social engagement, using the only typology of participated public space that could be symbolically recognisable by the citizens, namely the domestic one.

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