Living on the Edge: Housing Development at Tbilisi’s Periphery Evangeline Linkous, PhD, AICP University of South Florida
Introduction Housing development at the urban periphery is the subject of extensive research across a variety of disciplines. In the post-socialist context, peri-urban development demonstrates distinctive socio-spatial characteristics. These stem from state planning and land ownership during communist regimes, socio-economic and institutional turmoil in the 1990s transition, and the impacts of economic recovery and globalization in recent decades. A recurring theme in contemporary research on suburbanization in post-socialist countries is the role of global and Western forces—including marketization, foreign capital, and the European Union—on peri-urban housing development. The research also calls attention to factors that account for regional variations in fringe forms and processes. This paper explores housing development at Tbilisi’s urban periphery and is organized as follows: I first briefly review the literature on Soviet and Post-Soviet urban peripheries. Second, I provide an historical overview of Tbilisi’s fringe, charting the socio-economic and planning processes that shaped Tbilisi and its hinterlands. Third, I describe three housing developments currently shaping Tbilisi’s periphery: Tbilisi Sea New City, Lisi Green-Town, and Satibe. The paper concludes with a finding that Tbilisi’s fringe is being constructed in ways that reflect marketization and globalization, while the projects also demonstrate an embeddedness in Georgia’s political and fiscal context. Soviet and Post-Soviet Peripheries At the dawn of the 20th century, many of the nation-states that would become part of the Soviet Union were largely agricultural, and development at the urban fringe was mostly “self-built,” driven by rural-to-urban migration of the poor and war refugees (Hirt and Kovachev, 2015). By the 1920s, empowered governance regimes fostered state-led planning solutions for the periphery. Like their Western counterparts, early Soviet suburbs were influenced by Garden City ideals and conceived as an alternative to disorganized, congested urban areas—a “modernist endeavor aimed at the transformation of urban form and lifestyle” (Hirt, 2018). The inner city was seen as old fashioned and bourgeois. In Russian cities, mikrorayons—Soviet-era residential districts usually built in a block form combining multifamily housing and open space—were first proposed in the 1920s along with a vision of massive peripheral expansion. Soviet-era new towns were conceived as autonomous communities to be separated by greenbelts (Hirt and Kovachev, 2015). In practice, mass decentralization proved too costly to implement, so mass housing districts constructed around old urban centers became the dominant form of Soviet-era fringe development. Industrialization was central to planned urban expansion in the Soviet Union. Early microrayon planning typically linked housing to factories developed on former agricultural lands at the fringe now under public ownership. Without market constraints and in conformance to social planning objectives, mikrorayons typically included large park and open space areas (usually at least 30% of the district), healthcare services, educational facilities, cultural venues, and subsidized transit (Shavishvili, 2009). Although in theory Soviet society was classless and urban space not socially segregated, in fact centrally-located neighborhoods were favored by party and cultural elites, and housing blocks at the periphery were more often the domain of the working class and ethnic minorities. In the later years of the Soviet Union, housing estates declined in quality and amenities as national economies weakened. In addition to housing blocks, the urban periphery also accommodated summer cottages and country estates known as dachas. Originally associated with the aristocracy, dachas were granted to party and cultural elites during the Soviet period. Post-war food shortages fostered a policy of granting garden plots
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