Collectivist ideals and Soviet consumer spaces: mikrorayon commercial centres in Vilnius, Lithuania and Tallinn, Estonia

This chapter focuses on Soviet mikrorayon centres—multifunctional social, and commercial centres—built in large housing estates in Vilnius, Lithuania and Tallinn, Estonia from the 1960s to the 1980s. In both countries, ensuring proper services to modern citizens was initially based on the conceptual model of a multistage domestic service system with small shops integrated into the urban fabric next to homes, and larger mikrorayon centres with self-service supermarkets reachable by foot without crossing wide roads. Mikrorayon centres also represented a novel type of urban space. New pedestrian commercial centres, influenced by the Vällingby centre in Stockholm and Tapiola centre near Helsinki, operated as a simulation of traditional city centres in sparse, freely planned new settlements. We argue that the theoretical model of multistage domestic services, as well the ideological and communal mission of the centres, was quickly reworked into a type of space that embraced consumption and individual behaviour within the framework of collectivism. The study shows how the architectural form and visual aesthetic of the centres had a specific role in this. As such, the Soviet mikrorayon centres were the product and defining part of the hybrid nature of late Soviet society and represent a peculiar type of spatiality where conflicting value systems do not exclude each other but instead interact