Category: workshop III – Transnational Trends

Dasha Kuletskaya 

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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. 

 

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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.

Liat Eisen

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The use of incentives by the public sector as a means to rely on the private sector to provide public amenities has became a catalyst for urban development in the past three decades. Privatized urban public space is the spatial manifestation of such incentives, which constitutes a platform for a broad debate among sociologists, political scientists, economists and policymakers about the notion and consequences of commodification of urban public space.

This presentation will discuss the role of incentives for urban development by examining the case of privatized urban public spaces in NYC as a result of 1961 zoning resolution and its impact on the proliferation of Privately Owned Public Spaces (POPS) in advanced global cities.

 

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Liat Eisen is an architect, urban planner and a PhD candidate for public and urban policy at the Milano School of Policy, Management, and Environmental at the New School. Liat’s research interests include privatization of urban public space, incentives for urban development, spatial politics and conflict resolution in divided cities.

Razi Khader

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Amid the popular mobilization of the first Intifada, a group of young scholars from the Hebron Polytechnic, decided to focus their attention on the urban fabric and residences of Hebron’s Old City. Through architectural conservation, the Hebron University Graduates Union (UGU) invested dilapidated structures with architectural values that foster their position as cultural assets. In 1995, this conservation project was endorsed by the Palestinian Authority and led to the transformation of the grassroots UGU into the semi-governmental Hebron Rehabilitation Committee (HRC). The high technical abilities and rigorous professional interventions of the HRC won the highest international recognition, first with the Aga Khan Award for Islamic Architecture in 1998, and two decades later, with the declaration of the Old City as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  

This paper explores HRC’s post-Oslo shift towards the global frameworks of the Aga Khan award and ultimately UNESCO’s World Heritage. I argue that this transition entails a shift from the modest external funds allocated to the UGU into a full-blown transnational market and finance, thus accelerating and systemizing heritage management. From this financial perspective, the PA’s endorsement of this project was not only a diplomatic achievement but also a financial opportunity. It allowed the HRC to participate in the global heritage market by including its rehabilitation project in a national framework, hence eligible candidate for the UNESCO World Heritage List.  I examine how the HRC’s venture onto these global grounds swept Hebron’s Old City into the neoliberal market of heritage and heritage tourism, moreover, how this transnational finance and management affected the tools and dialectics of heritage making in Hebron’s Old City.  

I explore how HRC’s rehabilitation project was economically, ethicaly, and aesthetically realized. First, I examine the conservation praxis through HRC’s architectural practice as the catalyst for the diplomatic approach to heritage market. Second, I draw on primary documents of the HRC and its publicationsc to analyse the heritage discourse and management, leading to the nomination of Old Hebron to UNESCO’s World Heritage list.  

 

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Razi Khader has a B.Sc in Architecture from the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning at the Technion, where they graduated summa cum laude. They are currently working on their master’s thesis on the architectural conservation project of Old Hebron, Palestine. Razi has presented papers in national and international conferences, such as the 2021 European Architectural History Network Thematic Conference. Razi and their research earned the dean’s excellence award and the Li Ka Shing Fellowship. Razi is also a secondary teacher and assistant in a history, theory, and criticism course on architecture in Israel in the 20th and 21st century.