When Private and Public React Together: Regimes of Privatization and their Consequences in Visaginas
Abstract
The chapter by Michal Lehečka, Miriam Nessler and Siarhei Liubimau constructs the Visaginas environment as an empirical setting for a discussion of the process and outcomes of housing privatization in the CEE after socialism. By placing the Visaginas case in mainstream conceptualizations within this topic, the authors trace how the housing privatization process in Visaginas was impacted by the type of industry, ethnic and professional identity of the town residents, as well as by the urban planning decisions taken at the time of the town's founding.
As a result, the Visaginas case is discussed as "a productive challenge for the application of a conceptual ensemble for tackling the privatization of housing in the CEE after socialism." First, the authors show how the strategic significance of the nuclear industry has suppressed the culture of privatism and a social Darwinist orientation both in late Soviet and post-Soviet contexts. This culture and orientation are often discussed as inevitable outcomes of transformations after socialism.
Second, the authors observe that the scale of the INPP technology in the independent Lithuania and in the EU hindered the process of the de-centralization of resource acquisition characteristic to other urban environments linked to Soviet and socialist industrial enterprises. In 2020, the centrally secured INPP budget continues to be a major factor of well-being of Visaginas residents.
And, third, the authors show that housing was not an unbundled arena central to social transformation (a configuration that gives rise to a privatism culture), but embedded in a wider holistic teleological urban planning template. This template enforced egalitarian values on Visaginas society via dense welfare infrastructures and well invested open public spaces.