Authors

Lois Kalb¹;  ¹ European University Institute, Italy

Discussion

The late Soviet mass housing program meant to provide urban dwellers with single family apartments and good living standards. However, late Soviet bureaucratic processes caused widespread delays in housing provision and maintenance. Using interviews conducted with residents in Kyiv and Riga, my paper looks at how these delays shaped processes of waithood. I describe how residents entered into a range of local relationships and interactions. By looking at expectations of certain material conditions and lifeforms and anticipations of a society of property and value, I show that these processes of waithood fundamentally shaped informal claims to ownership in the late Soviet period. In the paper, I argue that these informal claims led to post-socialist urban transformation, housing privatization, class formations and new forms of gender and family relations. By employing waithood, as a lens, I aim to show that the late Soviet urban political economy enabled post-socialist urban change.