Authors
Oliver Banatvala1; 1 School of Slavonic and East European Studies, UK Discussion
My research focuses on the integration of the shopping mall into Russia’s war on Ukraine. Given the relatively recent development of the mall typology within the history of urban space, the interaction between the mall and war is a relatively new phenomenon which is being carried out in this war on an unprecedented scale. Since Russia's full-scale invasion, malls in Russia, Ukraine, and the wider region, have been influenced in a variety of ways: in addition to their systematic destruction at the hands of the Russian army, they have transformed to reflect the resulting geopolitical and economic shifts, been co-opted by society as quasi-public sites for performative political acts, morphed into refugee shelters, and been raided by police during Russia’s mobilization. This presentation provides insight into the ways in which the everyday space of the mall – known for its ‘malleability’, or its ability to integrate itself successfully into a variety of contexts – moulds itself to the extreme conditions of war. It shows the mall – a surprisingly underexplored building typology in the context of neoliberal East European urbanism – to be an arena in which humans interact with relatively abstract and nebulous concepts ranging from geopolitics to ideology. It thus helps develop an understanding of the everyday urban experience during wartime. 
