Chapter 4
26 April 2010 – Supilinn, Tartu, Estonia
A professional artist recounts their experience squatting in an abandoned house, as well as how the neighborhood and community changed throughout time.
Today we celebrated the end of this year’s Supilinn Days festival with a march urging City Council to protect our neighborhood’s cobblestone streets. They’re thinking of adding some more concrete between the asphalt parking lots they have already covered our green spaces with – but I’ll be damned if we’ll let them take control over our home! If anything, this year’s festival should show them just how united we are as a community. And to think we’ve been going for almost 10 years already. Even at the end of the Soviet period, we dreamt about organising a festival in Supilinn. It seemed an avant-garde idea that had not been realized anywhere else in Estonia before.
When the Soviets packed up and left, they left us at worst rubble and at best run-down hellholes to rebuild upon. Supilinn was a particularly ugly hellhole in the eyes of many back then. Vacant buildings, unused wastelands – one could even call it apocalyptic if they were a bit dramatic. I’m not dramatic, however. No, to me and many other broke artists, coming from all walks of life, Supilinn was an opportunity to build a place of our own and shape it to our own image. Supilinn offered total freedom, albeit at the cost of comfort. But at that time, I was young, bright-eyed and with a penchant for trouble, so squatting was the least of my concerns.
I’ve got to admit, though, I was a bit apprehensive when the first wave of new people came through. Still young, still broke, but they were definitely not artists. They were just... people. Still, they seemed to appreciate the non-conformist and tolerant community we had already been building there – well that and the very affordable housing prices. Actually, some of the people who came to Supilinn with this wave are now amongst the most active members of the Supilinn Society! Truth is we got along fine, despite our minor differences. What was most important was that we all cared deeply about our community, about preserving its spirit.
So if it ain’t broke, why fix it?! I guess that’s something you should ask City Council who have suddenly grown uncomfortable with the way our neighborhood “looks”. I guess they realized it’d be a waste to not get their money’s worth off of this central city area. Last week, policemen spotted a couple of kids taking a shortcut through a hole in the fence to their corner story. Today, that whole is patched up and tidy. Locked front doors, remote-controlled gates, white picket fences – it feels like we’re getting ready for somebody’s arrival, only they seem bound to stay for the long-term.
- Entry by Sofia, 43 y.o.
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Researcher's Notes.
Prior to the introduction of market-based economies in former communist states, individual neighborhoods were relatively homogenous economically-speaking. As societies gradually became more and more fragmented, a new affluent middle class was born. But this process was a lengthy one, taking place over roughly a decade. Before this middle class could exercise its economic influence over a neighborhood's development, pioneer gentrifiers were represented by groups like students and artists that elevated an area through their social rather than economic capital. From that perspective, the Supillin neighborhood in Tartu, Estonia is a time capsule, as residents hold onto their roots in the face of modern gentrification efforts servicing incoming middle-classes.
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community:
A strong sense of belonging can be interpreted from the storyteller's account of their neighborhood and communal events. This contributes to the strong place attachment and facilitation of everyday interactions the community in Supilinn experience, leading to a pronounced willingness to stay in their area and a rejection of social, as well as physical transformation of the area.
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broke artists:
This describes the first wave and type of gentrifiers that moved to the area: those who possess creative and cultural, rather than economic capital.
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new people:
The storyteller is here referring to the second wave of gentrifiers - the marginal gentrifiers. Marginal gentrifiers are a faction of the liberal left within the new middle class which actively and effectively seeks out social (and ethnic) mixing in old, traditional neighborhoods in the city centre.
Therefore, marginal gentrification, a type of gentrification specific to post-socialist countries, generally involves the less privileged sectors of the new middle classes that display a significant gap between their high levels of educational capital and culture and their low level of economic capital. They are individuals who are underemployed or in precarious, temporary employment but prefer to live in central areas of the city, thus becoming pioneer gentrifiers, presumably attracted by the non-conformist lifestyle and the tolerant, socially and ethnically mixed urban environment of city centre neighborhoods and rejecting the conventional normativity of modern urban planning.
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we all cared deeply:
What can be seen here, is that the first and second wave of gentrifiers integrated well with one another. This might mostly be due to the fact that they have overlapping beliefs of what the neighborhood ought to look and be like. A discord in perspectives on what the neighborhood should be like could thus lead to conflict between different groups of gentrifiers.
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somebody's arrival:
Here, the storyteller is anticipating the arrival of the third-wave gentrifiers that are bound to homogenise the neighborhood. These gentrifiers can be assimilated to the "classic" middle-class households in Western gentrification processes. They have ideas about what the neighborhood is ought to be that are in conflict with those of the first- and second-wave gentrifiers, which could explain the collective opposition against these third-wave gentrifiers in Supilinn.