TRANSFORMATION OF PUBLIC SPACES OF THE VINOGRADAR RESIDENTIAL AREA IN KIEV

TRANSFORMATION OF PUBLIC SPACES OF THE VINOGRADAR RESIDENTIAL AREA IN KIEV Nadiia Antonenko, Tetiana Rumilets The collapse of the USSR led to the destruction of the centralized management system of enterprises serving the population, created to ensure the sustainable existence of public places in certain micro-districts: street spaces, cultural institutions, customer services, a network of institutions for children and teenagers while in school and for after-school leisure, structures of housing and communal services.

After the state funding was suspended, the system lost its usual management mechanism, and the spatial formations were transformed and adapted to the model of new socio-economic relations. The new spatiality of the post-Soviet microdistricts turned out to be far from the world's modern ideas about the standards of sustainable urban living environment.

At the same time, when referring to historical descriptions and evidence of the urban structures development of individual Soviet micro-districts and the history of their everyday life, we find that in the new conditions, there is no holistic view of the influence of the local contexts on the survival of spatial elements of the destroyed Soviet benefits distribution system. Residential areas are not personalized; their analysis, usually, is within the framework of one of the well-established scientific paradigms, where Soviet residential construction is presented as: (1) a radical turn in solving the housing problem, modernizing the settlement system, social services and life support systems of the city whichmade it possible to return architecture and city planning in the USSR to the general path of the world architecture development; (2) a catastrophic destructive phenomenon that disrupted the traditional way of life of preSoviet cities, as a result of which they lost their individuality, human scale, and the environment was schematized to a primitive level and therefore dehumanized [1].

Meanwhile, observation of the historical development of different microdistricts demonstrates that the habits, lifestyle, and thoughts of local residents, their social and professional affiliation, the presence of good neighborly relations and associations in the context of a specific functionally-planning structure — all were important factors that slowed down the degradation of the urban environment or, conversely, accelerated it.

The relevance of researching the history of the development of public places in residential areas during the period of mass industrial construction is primarily due to the fact that Sovietcitiesfaced the need to develop strategies for their new spatial development. To solve this problem, many researchers turned to the topic of transformations of post-Soviet spaces from various positions, describing the history of socio-political transformations [2], economic prerequisites [3], considering the constructive possibilities of transforming outdated urban structures [4], proposing specific program measures [5] and experimental practices [6].In our opinion, the main task, which in the future will make it possible to change the post-Soviet spatial structures of residential areas qualitatively, is to determine the causes and content of spatial changes in the period from the late 1960s to the early 2020s. This overview, prepared based on the examples of the development history of specific residential areas, will allow us to determine the functional and spatial framework of microdistricts, which keeps the urban formation from its complete degradation.

The Vynogradar residential area on the northwestern outskirts of Kyivwas chosen as an object of the study.The Vynogradar project is a design idea of one architect — EdwardBilsky. A master plan of a residential area, plans of detailed layouts of microdistricts, architectural and interior solutions of public buildings have been designed by Bilsky personally and by the Kyivproekt design group under his leadership [7].

A feature of the Vynogradar's project design was a developed system of public consumer services and cultural enterprises, which were located not only in places of maximum concentration of the population — at the intersections of main highways and public transport stops (as it can be clearly seen in the Saltovskyi residential area in Kharkiv [8]), but and within the microdistricts themselves, in the form of small 1-2-story buildings or additions to residential buildings (Fig.1).

Fig. 1. The Vinogradar residential area project The designers who created Vynogradar tried to implement an integrated aesthetic approach to the creation of a living environment. The desire to move away from the facelessness of the residential area led to the creation of curvilinear plans for residential buildings, raised flower beds, undulating paths, on which colorful sculptures or intricate bas-reliefs greeted a pedestrian[9].However, the theoretical meaning of the Soviet "environmental approach" concept was limited by structural, functional, and formallycompositional methods aimed at working with the environment, meaning alandscape-natural and culturalhistorical contexts.

Since the social institute of design under Soviet conditions did not have a comprehensive understanding of the structure of emerging human needs, the accumulation of needs in the form of a specific structure of the population's demand and the satisfaction of this demand through construction programs, as has been the case in the West since the 1960s in the form of participatory practices, in the USSR was impossible. The inclusion of the subjective component in the concept of the environment as an object of project work proceeded from the idea about the population of the future residential area as an ideal society of already built communism [10]. Real residents were not perceived as the community — a subject of the project. Instead, in focus was an ideal model of society, similar to the community of solaries in the utopian City of the Sun by T. Campanella [11] (Fig.2).

Fig. 2. The City of the Sun by T. Campanella The ideas of T. Campanella's utopia found a response with communist ideology, for example, in the idea of abolishing the family. The author considered the concept of the family to be the main reason for the emergence of private property and social inequality. The “institute� of the family in the USSR was preserved, the idea of a cardinal socialization of everyday life was abandoned back in the 1930s, but the upbringing of a person as a worthy member of the communist society and the creation of a harmonious personality remained the central tasks of the communist state until its collapse.From the City of the Sun, the idea of visual training and enlightenment of the population was also taken. In the utopian city of T. Campanella, all the walls of buildings were covered with and explanatory inscriptions. Likewise, the monumental works of art by Soviet monumentalists were harmoniously included in the unique exteriors of the buildings and street spaces of Vynogradar(Fig. 3).

Fig. 3. Some ofsculptures of L. Muraviovain the Vynogradar For Soviet urban structures, whichconsisted of residential, industrial elements and the urban center system, it was typical that the employed population used residential services periodically —after

work or on weekends. The function of a public place — a place of interaction of the adult population with each other — was performed by trade enterprises, where residents had to spend most of their time standing in queues for another "scarce" product that was "thrown" on the counter.

The residential areas turned out to be the place where the main production and cultural activities of the children and youth took place. The Vynogradar is an example of a reference residential area, the layout of which was developed on the basis of the trajectories of children and teenager’s movement, the equatable placement of educational institutions, which filled microdistricts with cultural activities in the absence of adult population working during the day. In addition to schools and kindergartens, which were directly involved in the educational process, the project included: pioneer organizations, children's and teenage sports and scientific clubs, libraries, art, music, and choreographic schools, a cinema. All these were interconnected together by transits and playgrounds in between.

The core of the residential area was a long central square-esplanade, which was to include a cinema, a house of culture, a palace of pioneers, a youth center, a swimming pool, a wedding palace, an indoor market, shops, and restaurants. This square was supposed to connect the center of the residential area with the Pushcha-Vodytsia forest and the Blue Lake, where it was planned to build a children's amusement park and a large water sports complex. The square was divided vertically into two levels: the lower level was intended for car traffic, and the upper — for pedestrians. All the inner alleys of the microdistricts, with smaller public buildings located on them — ateliers, shops, children's libraries and clubs, were directed to this center[12].

The Vynogradar was implemented in several stages. First, a communal zone was built, which included a pumping station, a district boiler house with a fuel oil storage, a fire station, a regional automatic telephone exchange, a TTU traction substation with a control room, a bus dispatch room and station, railway and air ticket offices, and two design institutes with production facilities. Then the construction of residential buildings and primary service enterprises — schools, kindergartens, grocery, hardware, and consumer services stores — began. The first buildings were completed in 1975 and inhabited by the builders of microdistrict №1 themselves. Buildings were occupied immediately after completion: whole buildings or entrances were populated by employees from several enterprises. This approach created conditions for good neighborly relations — the residents knew each other before.

The area was gradually filled with enterprises of cultural services, and considering the primary task of providing housing, the construction of buildings in the central core was being postponed. For a long time in its place there was a wide strip of wasteland dividing the microdiscricts and used by local children as a place for games and picnics.

The project with a two-level center was considered expensive, and the architects had to transform it into a simpler, planar solution. At the same time, the set of planned cultural institutions and enterprises of consumer services decreased significantly. Soon the ideas to build a water sports complex and a town of children's attractions were also abandoned for economic reasons. Without the establishment of a special sports institution, the forest and lakes were used by children's and youth sports clubs. In the 1970s —1980s, joint bicycle rides, skiing, touristic, team and other kinds of sport were popularamong local population. The forest was also actively used by schools for thematic classes.

The construction of the first building of the project’s central core — a 7-hall cinema — was started only in 1986, but soon it seemed too pretentious and expensive to the party leadership. Despite all the efforts of the author, in 1991, this construction was stopped, although the walls were erected, as well as the ceilings and roofing have been partially completed.There was no further development of the Vynogradar’s center during the Soviet period.The residential area was devoid of a static public place — a square or a par. Public zones were of a transit nature, with the only exceptions — the adjoining territories, occupied by the older generation, and playgrounds(Fig.4).

Fig. 4. The project of a 7-hall cinema Thus, along with the developed system of children's education and extracurricular activities scattered across the microdistricts, in the very central part of the residential area unplanned, before the collapse of the Soviet Union, two non-systemic public areas were created — a wasteland and an "abandoned place". Both were used at the same time: (1) by children and teenagers as places for games and meetings, (2) and for hangouts by disadvantaged people whose presence on the streets by the 1990s stopped to be controlled by the police and people's guards (Fig.5).

Fig. 5. The main public places of the Vynogradar in 1980s One of the features of the Soviet housing planning was the ignorance of a person's need for personal space.Perhaps it was the desire for isolation, the demand for respect for personal spatial and socio-psychological boundaries, that became one of the reasons for the marginalization of late Soviet society[13].

Since the late 1980s the adaptation of Soviet society to new socio-economic conditions began to take place.The manifestation of negative adaptation was expressed in the form of a parasitic-dependent model, which was expressed in economic passivity and the hope for voluntary help from the outside, as well as in a model of social parasitism, which used violent methods of obtaining goods for living at the expense of others (theft, racketeering, blackmail) [14].The zones of teenage groups meetings began to intersect and mix with the local semi-criminal world.As a result, the urban public spaces of the Vynogradar began to acquire a new form of their publicity.People leading an asocial lifestyle — alcoholics, drug addicts, prostitutes, vagabonds, gamblers, local crime bosses and their gangs — conquered and devoured public spaces, turning them into the infrastructure that served their activities (Fig. 6).

Fig. 6. Local residents of the Vynogradar There appeared stable places of public drinking of alcohol, sale and usage of drugs, speed dating, thefts and robberies, joint get-togethers of certain subcultures, etc.So, for example, from a place of games and picnics, a “wasteland” has gradually turned into a place for a showdown in the world of criminal and teenage gangs.Rapid degradation of the urban environment was also observed in places where small-sized apartments were concentrated — small family housing and dormitories.The segregated living environment, inhabited mainly by workers of crumbling factoriesaccelerated the processes.

Illegal activities that appeared and has been hidden during the Soviet period, after Ukraine gained independence, began to spread rapidly.They became the backbone for the development of local entrepreneurship, which brought in quick money.Around a communal zone of the residential area, a spontaneous street market was formed, which began to function as a public center of the Vynogradar.Additional sub-centers of the same commercial nature in the form of stalls and tents have appeared in crowded places at the crossroads.A long section from the trolleybus depot to the newly formed market along the Freedom Ave. — the so-called "Broadway" — acquired an important social role as a place for evening and night communication of local youth.

At the same time, the system of cultural services enterprises for the children and teenagers that had developed in the Soviet era and played the supporting structure role for residential area, began to collapse.The main reason for this was the loss of the moral and political unity of Soviet society, which was ensured by the party, affiliated organizations, and educational institutions directly.Party organizations were liquidated, enterprises were on the brink of survival, and children's art schools became paid and, therefore, inaccessible to parts of the population. Sports clubs, and to a lesser extent, schools, having lost the support of party organizations, became public places in the environment of which youth gangs were formed.Schools began to be divided into "gangster" and "good" schools.There is evidence that in the 1990s at Vynogradar there were situations when the management of some schools cooperated closely with local criminal structures themselves.

The impoverished housing maintenance services could not provide care and control over the technical condition of courtyards and public places.Improvement elements were broken, rendered unusable, some of the works of artwere scrapped.The spatiality of the adjacent playgrounds also began to change — in the evening and at night they began to be actively used by groups of asocial persons, some playgrounds lost their function and turned into transit territories.

The places of permanent residence of children's and teenage groups have changed. They spent evenings in the pavilions of kindergartens, which hid them from the environment, or in the "abandoned place", which received the popular name “House of Culture “Bum” (Fig. 7).Also, hastily organized "igrovukhi" and "vidukhi" — places of paid access to watching foreign movies, playing video games, and a little later – to the Internet — became places of constant communication between teenagers.

Fig. 7. The current state of the unfinished cinema Important for the Vynogradar lakes and forests have changed their functional significance.On weekends, as before, the forest was used for family outings, walks and picnics. However, it was no longer a place for play and education. It became unsafe, especially in the evening, when groups of drug addicts began to gather often in the forest to use substances.Sport activities in the 1990s also practically left the forest to the clubs’ spaces, as it concentrated primarily on the development of gyms and martial arts, which were in demand and popularized among local youth (Fig. 8).

Fig. 8. The main public places of the Vynogradar in 1990s By the 2000s, restructuring and adaptation of old spatial systems to new market conditions has been completed.The socio-economic situation has stabilized.There was a segregation of society: one part of the population completed a positive adaptation — changed their profession and the direction of employment, and the other — consolidated their deviant behavior [15].

The market has lost its key importance.During 10 years, the collapsed Soviet institutions of consumer services have been almost completely replaced by commercial structures of trade importance.

Chain supermarkets were located in the buildings of old department stores, shopping malls, and new buildings.Small shops and cafes appeared within the microdistricts, which were focused on meeting partial demand — primarily those focused on the sale of coffee, cigarettes, draft and bottled alcohol.Deviant groups were their target audience.These points of sale, as well as points of glass containers and wastepaper reception, were spontaneous at first. Over time they turned into permanent meeting places and became some kind of centers of microdistrict public life.They actively formed a comfortable living environment for themselves, mastered almost the entire space of the residential area, and drove out other social groups from it.

The part of the forest close to the residential area was commercialized, turned into a public recreational place. A restaurant and hotel complex appeared in the forest. A rope park— paid attraction for children — was organized, as well as tables, tents and tiny houses for picnics started to be available for rent.

The number of children's and sports clubs that existed in Soviet times have changed —some of them were closed or changed their function.However, the system of children's leisure facilities was able to survive, turning into relatively inexpensive paid clubs for the development of children.Functionally, it has been complemented by many smaller, more expensive private clubs and mini kindergartens.In the courtyard spaces, there is still a need to organize the play activities of young children.Children's playgrounds were partially renovated, old structures were removed.

State kindergartens and schools mostly closed their territories, they ceased to be public, used by groups of teenagers for meetings and communication after classes.And with the spread of the Internet and the transfer of the communicative function to the virtual world, the urgency for such sites was no longer needed.In connection with this, the significance of the once popular "Broadway" on Svoboda Avenue was lost.Older children and teenagers gradually left the streets, the space of micro-districts almost completely began to belong either to commercial enterprises (acting as a continuation of the function of their internal territory) or to asocial groups of the population, whose number has grown significantly over 30 years.Shopping and entertainment centers located in adjacent residential areas and entertainment institutions in the central part of the city have become centers of youth communication.

In 2003, the construction of a vacant lot in the central part of a residential area between microdistrict№1 and №2 was resumed.It was decided to build 13 residential buildings of the KTU series, with a small park and children playground in between.The public function of the center was preserved, small two-story commercial buildings were added to each of the residential buildings. According to the project, a large temple was planned to be located behind the residential buildings along the axis of the square, but it was not built.Four new buildings, located in the center of the unfinished cinema, completely blocked the possibility of connecting the microdistrict with the forest by a long central square-esplanade (Fig. 9).

Fig. 9. Theproject of a pedestrian esplanade The area around the new residential building became filled with parking lots on all sides.Due to the lack of parking spaces and outdated road infrastructure, car drivers started to use wide pedestrian alleys along the streets as roads and drive ways, and areas without buildings — for parking.

At the end of the 2010s the apple gardens of the local state farm, which played the role of a buffer zone between the Vynogradar and the rest of the city for a long time, were cut down for the development of new residential areas.The start of new construction stimulated the development of the urban environment. In 2020, a shopping mall with a cinema, which is gradually becoming the central public place of the residential area, was built, and the construction of a metro line to the Vynogradar was launched (Fig. 10).

Fig. 10. The main public places of the Vynogradar in early 2020s Conclusion The Vynogradar residential area went through three stages of public spaces development, which were associated with the change of the main consumers.Since the 1970-1980s, the system of public spaces and its organization has been tied to a centrally controlled distribution network of cultural and educational services implemented in relation to the permanent population of the residential area, which was comprised of children and teenagers.In the 1990s, the system of public spaces was partially destroyed. Children and teenagers remained an important forming social group. However, public space was actively captured by marginal asocial communities, which led to a partial mixing of both — social groups and public spaces that they used simultaneously.Since the 2000s, when the adaptive period was over, children and teenagershave practically left the public spaces of the microdistricts, partially remaining in the legal zones of the renovated playgrounds. Almost the entire public space of the residential area was subordinated to meeting places for deviant groups of the population.

Thanks to the project design, which included a developed system and a balanced placement of cultural services for children and teenagers, the living environment of the Vynogradar avoided complete degradation and turning into an absolute ghetto, despite its remoteness from the city center and the occupation of public spaces by asocial groups.

The capitalization of the former garden’s territory will lead to the further capitalization of the old residential area. Appearance of new large housing area, an opening of a shopping and entertainment mall, as well as the construction of subway stations should soon lead to the forcing of local marginal groups out of some of the public spaces of Vynogradar. An additional incentive to normalize the internal public space of a residential area can be the strengthening of the existing structure of the microdistrict, which relies on children's and teenage institutions.

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