Dasha Kuletskaya
For the first two decades after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Belarusian government refused to back neoliberal reforms in most economic sectors, including the housing market. The strong state control of the economy led to a common perception among international organizations and scientists that neoliberal shift never happened in Belarus has remained the ‘museum of socialism.’ However, this perception no longer holds: I argue that since 2009 Minsk has been experiencing a neoliberal shift in housing, where the authoritarian state has been playing a major role in removing barriers to profit extraction. Taking a large contemporary housing development as an example, I will show the interconnection of housing-as-policy, housing-as-market, housing-as-finance, and housing-as-design. I argue that the strive for profit maximization reshaped the urban layout and architecture of this development, which can be read as the built evidence of various practices of investment minimization. Furthermore, I argue that architecture is not just a built manifestation of these practices. As a professional practice, it contributes to this change in a twofold manner: by deploying its’ design expertise to extract maximum profit from the urban space and by providing seductive visual material to sell this space to the population, both as real apartments and as a political project.
Dasha Kuletskaya: Architect, teaching and research associate in the Department for Building Design and Realization at the Faculty of Architecture, RWTH Aachen, Germany. She holds B.Sc. in Architecture from Technical University of Vienna and M.Sc. in Architecture from RWTH Aachen. In 2021, she received the IDEA League Research Grant to conduct a research stay at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta), ETH Zurich. Dasha’s research focuses on the questions of land, finance, real estate, and architecture, and the production of housing in the context of global capitalism. In her doctoral dissertation project, she focuses on the recent transition in the housing market in Minsk, Belarus. Before starting her PhD, Dasha worked as an architect at several design offices in Vienna, Moscow, Aachen, and Cologne.