FROM TIFLIS TO TBILISI - DALI AND ELENE DARJANIA

The current dialog is an attempt to answer a frequently asked question - ‘how does the Soviet planning influence today’s Tbilisi?’ This text is structured as a dialogue for two reasons: firstly, because we - the authors - have different standpoints. Secondly, because we believe that the city - the subject of our discussion - is a space of conflict, where the nexus of various opinions and beliefs is the prerequisite of a balance. Of course, we could not describe all the changes that Tbilisi underwent during the Soviet era in 1000 words, thereby we only focus on some key myths and presumptions.

E : At the beginning, I want to clarify the difference between the urban planning/design/architectural project of a city and the ‘built city’. The former should be understood as a political project - a concept, which is a base for future development. I must admit I’m highly influenced by the works of Pier Vittorio Aureli [1], who speculates on the topic. Having said that, I describe a project as a fragile framework defined by means of drawings, sketches, diagrams, and models, which can both “emancipate from and dominate over the social and political reality”.

The city cannot be a completed project - apparently, we all agree on this. It’s hard to name a city, which was scrupulously planned, designed and built in accordance to the envisioned project, and, finally, the city that stayed within that defined framework. Thus, when we discuss socialist Tbilisi, we should articulate both ‘facets’ of the city.

D : So, Tovarishch[2], what is a socialist city project?

E : The October Revolution brought dramatic ideological changes to Russian Empire, of which Georgia was a part. It was a time when designers were trying to rethink the traditional principles of design to create qualitatively new settlements for the new, collective life. First of all, this meant an adoption of a new form of housing. According to these projects (some of which were actually built in some cities in Russia), individual space was limited to a small room with very basic furnishing - a bed, a table and a chair - and the residents were thought to use shared bathrooms and kitchens. This kind of ‘residential cells’ comprised the multi-unit buildings, which, in turn, were arranged as residential blocks - so called ‘microrayons’ - with some basic day-to-day services. Overall, the city (aka its project) was arranged as a linear structure with clearly defined functions, residential, industrial, recreational, and other zones, arranged along a transportation corridor. In fact, everything in such a city was planned with the logic of a factory conveyer - the flows of labour forces and goods.


D : Your argument is clear. But I think, to lay the frame of our discussion, it is important to contextualize this idea of the “project” even further: the leitmotiv of the Soviet project was the achievement and implementation of a radiant “communist” society. During seventy years, this idea was always projected as something to reach for, an ultimate goal in the future. This way our built environment, the city, became the projection of a project. It was conceived as a transitional space on the way to the wider objective.
Moreover, I wouldn’t identify housing as a starting point because I believe that the idea of communality required a small-scale way of thinking. Russian pre-revolutionary thinkers betrayed the idea of creating a truly ‘people’s state’. They believed in anarchy as the prerequisite of a “bright future”, which would become a reality after the social revolution.

The fundamental theses for them was to create ‘a happiness for all’, which should have been based on equality. Consequently, this will have ensured solidarity and mutual help. Thus, I conclude that the core idea of a settlement should have been anarchical-socialist, meaning that the zoning and the connectors would superimpose over the arrangement of housing. As for my understanding, the question of societal needs came first, followed by the needs of individuals, which were then translated into the architecture of housing. As an example, I would recall an old soviet poster I found on a flee-market. The poster shows several versions of the interior of a factory building. The design of the poster highlights the idea that every labourer works for society, no matter what his/her occupation is. The most important was to show common excellence with which every worker could identify himself. 

In addition, the geography and the scale of residential arrays fully depended on the amount of labour forces needed to support the industry. Let’s say, ‘sleeping quarters’ were thought to serve undisturbed and productive functionality for the industry. This is especially true for some small cities, which would not be able to provide a labour force for the growing industry.

As you mentioned at the start of our conversation, a project has its own reality. What happened in the USSR, was an attempt to bring the ‘world of a project’ into real life without making any adjustments. The overwhelming control of everything - from the settlements to the routines of its citizens - left its trace on the form of the city: you are supposed to work here, to sleep there, and to walk out there, etc. I have an impression that to bring the project to life, to make the factories work and to settle tenants into homes, people drawn on the paper were substituted with ‘living organisms’.

This expression, ‘Living organisms’, reminds me of a quite overused phrase among Georgian urbanists - ‘The city is a living organism’. The proactive use of this metaphor is quite symptomatic: after the collapse of the industry in post soviet Georgia, Tbilisi turned to be a key producer of services in the country. In fact, the construction of new housing became the same kind of service as getting a new haircut. On the one hand, trade and service heavily affected the form of the city in a looser and more obvious way. On the other hand, according to popular slogans, there is a demand for a strong urban planner/policy, which, at the end, will draw up the political will and control into architecture.

E : I cannot agree that the roles of architects and urbanists should be limited to the function of ‘decorators’. Today we possess many other responsibilities beyond the professional ones. Nowadays architects and urbanists are more activists and a facilitators, rather than exclusive generators of ideas. That’s why the expectation that the ‘Messiah’ will appear and ‘clarify’ everything is waiting in vain.

But let’s get back to the subject of mass housing construction in the Soviet Union, which begins during the Khrushchev rule and, basically, was a part of the post war recovery and followed the world pattern. In general, this phase of modernisation stripped the architecture to its simplest skeleton. It’s widely agreed that Le Corbusier’s Dom-ino - a scheme of a one family living unit - was the key ‘game-changer’ and triggered the process. In the West, the one-family unit became the symbol of individual property of the middle class man. In the Soviet Union, it got an absolutely opposite meaning - the one of equality. The socialist state promised to ensure equal living conditions for all. However, in reality, the distribution of housing stock was far from being fair. According to surveys of archival documentations, the emerged ‘Soviet elite’ - new privileged class - lived in way better conditions, than the general proletariat.

D : I’m personally not very familiar with these surveys. Based on my observations, the amount and density of privileged people is also well indicated by the share size and distribution of a typical post-soviet 90’s phenomena: the horizontal extensions on residential buildings in certain Tbilisi neighbourhoods. Saburtalo district and Lilo settlement are very good starting point for such analysis.

Naturally, people are driven by the desire of a ‘different being’/’otherness’[3] - This is not my conclusion. Socialism gave humans the chance to experience this “otherness” once again: instead of the well - the tap water, in alternative to pit latrine - centralized sewage system, etc. All this would have been provided by technical progress anyway but the Soviet “system” mastered it way faster. But as time passed, a new ‘otherness’ became necessary.

In general, the faster the flow of information, the more diverse it is, the more we want this ‘different being’. And, even if today we consider our long-term planning as a very rational solution, it might still become a barrier. It turns into an obstacle for cultural advance - the developed world already learnt that lesson.

E : I cannot agree that the long-term planning, which society was so much used to during modernism, can be regarded as a barrier for development. However, there is an essential difference between a principle-based planning and a rule based-planning. The latter implies unconstrained obedience of grand narratives, which is characteristic for modernism in general. From my perspective, we [in Georgia] still follow this thread by inertia. This is why we frequently overuse quotes of Jane Jacobs as slogans, calling for the only possible version of a ‘liveable city’. By doing so we ignore the fact that Jacobs was against the stereotypic, mechanical solutions and was advocating for understanding the city as “an organized complexity”. The principle-based normatives create stigmatized neighbourhoods and divide them into ‘prestigious’ and ‘not-so-prestigious’ spaces.


D : … And the geography of Tbilisi is quite stigmatized: if you can’t see the TV tower ‘Andza’, you are not Tbiliseli. If you look at new infrastructural and/or cultural projects, flow of information, you’ll mention that they have been worked out mostly only for central districts. This way the scale of the city is being neglected, as if suburbs do not belong to Tbilisi…

Having said that, I think a sense of “scale” is the biggest inheritance Tbilisi got from the Soviets. It is obvious: you are as far, as slowly you move. And this happened when Tbilisi was thought of as a linear city, which should not have had a service problem. However, this might only be a management problem, which we messed up with.

Keeping in mind the question on scale, I also want to recall the line from the popular song[4] “Where is grizzled Mtatsminda?” or does Tbilisi have a truly unique landscape? And, if the answer is yes - how do we deal with it?
Perhaps, one could consider the built environment of the historic Old Tbilisi together with the landscape. However, claiming the same for the peripheral parts of the city would not be correct: The biggest part of Tbilisi population lives in suburban residential arrays - so called ‘massives‘. Those districts were constructed with the simplest possible landscape solutions in mind. Of course, this happened not because someone did not like the mountainous natural landscape, but because - as we discussed earlier - there was a different task to achieve. Dramatic landscape would have meant an increased level of difficulty for the designer to fulfil the project. But today, in the constructed real world we accept the landscape as a fact, which sometimes creates difficulties for mobility, and, sometimes for both physical and conceptual expansion. Such an approach romanticized a multiplicity of hypsographic curves and created a lot of myths: one of them is calling for unsuitability of cycling infrastructure in Tbilisi. The Heroes square with its adjacent large streets and the Vake-Saburtalo highway are also examples of battles against the landscape.
To conclude, the key problem, which we have inherited from the USSR, is not the spatial solutions, but the ignorance of the cultural prerequisites when introducing new concepts. This is obvious, when a human being is not able to identify ‘the new’ and cannot use it independently.

E : From my point of view, Tbilisi, as a socialist city project, was never actually fulfilled. Soviet Tbilisi, photographs of which usually pop-up in different nostalgic blog-posts, was not the city based on egalitarian and equality principles. The naive phrase “Tbilisi was a relationship”, in real life, meant way more than the friendliness and openness of its residents. It encompassed the sad reality that ‘good relationships’ - aka corrupted connections - ensured private benefits and privileges. Over the decades, this - together with other political factors - created inequality, which is probably the most overlooked and ignored result of the Soviet planning system.

[1] Aureli, Pier Vittorio. The City as a Project. Berlin: Ruby, 2013. Print.
[2] Tovarishch - (Russian) a comrade . Used as a term of address in the Soviet Union.
[3] From the notes of Shota Bostanashvili lectures “Poetics of Architecture’, Georgian Technical University
[4] “Tbiliso”, R. Laghidze, P. Gruzinsky, 1959