Nõukogude garaažikultuur. Soviet Garage Culture

Apart from its manifestation in the form of political ideology, the arts and the economic system, socialism also manifested itself in space. The socialist space did not only take shape ideologically, but was also influenced by societal limitations and possibilities. Because of this, it is important to shed light on everyday life in the Soviet Union, which did not necessarily consist of big slogans or open opposition, and which neither expressed loud support nor aversion in relation to the Soviet system. In this article I take a look at the garage areas (which were usually built in clusters) as spatial elements, and the garage culture associated with them. I describe how the garage was a necessary part of the car culture in Soviet society, a part which at times comprised objects, practices and meanings of its own: in other words, a garage culture. Cars have had a major impact on cityscapes in the West, where the number of cars per capita was many times larger than in the Soviet Union, but car usage has left its mark in socialist cities as well. Getting around in a car inevitably means aneed to park it somewhere; this basic fact applied to both sides of the Iron Curtain. However, garage areas have carried more importance in socialist societies – there is more of them, and they feature a large amount of parking spaces (hundreds if not thousands). The reason for this popularity was societal limitations and possibilities: on the one hand there was an opportunity for extensive land use brought about by the state ownership of land untouched by free-market search for profitability, but on the other hand there were also obstacles, created by a deficit. By enabling the car owner to keep his vehicle going, the garage had a concrete role to play in the Soviet economic system. The garage was a place where you could repair your car, store spare parts and protect it from potential theft. The role of the garage in Soviet car culture as described in this article draws on correspondents’ replies to the Estonian National Museum’s survey nr. 198 ’Bike. Car. Radio. Television’ (1997) regarding car usage in the Soviet era, as well as interviews and conversations with garage users over the course of five years. From these replies it became clear that the car did not only mean freedom of movement, which is what it is usually associated with, but it also became clear that the car required maintenance and effort, such as hands-on repair work at the garage. This gave rise to a place-centered kind of culture – a garage culture which was formed from neighbours socialising with one another, masculine car-centered activities, and transactions taking place outside of the official economic system

Decolonial approaches to urban transport geographies: Introduction to the special issue

The goal of this special issue is to argue for decolonial perspectives on urban transport and to begin exploring them empirically. The point of departure for this endeavour is our observation that northern thinking continues to underpin transport geography, limiting the development of the academic field as well as opportunities for locally-derived innovation in diverse localities across the global south and north

Embodied Othering Encounters with Muslim(-Looking) Passengers:Riding across Amsterdam, Tallinn, Leipzig, and Turku

Often framed in the public discourse as Europe’s ultimate Other, Muslims have been heftily debated and vastly problematized as violent, unfaithful suspect citizens, unwanted immigrants, part of a bad diversity, and refusal of modernity. Taking the Muslim Other into consideration, we explore young Muslim(-looking) passengers’ everyday Othering encounters within the (im)mobile spaces of public transport that entangle their bodies with different imaginaries, histories, emotions, and affects. Employing qualitative research methods in a cross-national and interurban study in Amsterdam, Tallinn, Leipzig, and Turku, which offer different dimensions of diversity, size, and history, important for understanding European cities in their complexities, we present public transport as a cross-cultural meeting place with socio-spatial negotiations of difference to study everyday travel experiences of 74 young Muslim(-looking) passengers. We highlight how Othering discourses become part of their everyday travel experiences. In so doing, we investigate multiple modes through which the Muslim Other is (re)produced and Othering is lived out in the networks of their everyday embodied, that is, sensorial, corporeal, and affective, experiences of public transport. In this way, we critically position public transport at the intersection of what it means to experience European cities through riding public transport.</p

Public transport qualities and inequalities in pandemic times

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed crucial tensions related to urban public infrastructure. Among those, questions regarding urban mobility, and public transport (PT) in particular, have received widespread attention in media and political debates. Stigmatisation, ridership slumps, funding problems and system closures have placed public transport systems in the centre of public debate about urban infrastructure. In this paper, we discuss three dimensions in which PT, as a site of urban armature, linking service provisions with individual needs, has been affected by COVID-19. First, we look at the user experience. Considering PT as public space shaped by encounters and emotions, we bring to the fore its contentious and complicated nature, affected by increasing or emerging anxieties and disturbances due to COVID-19. We further underline the inequity of transport provision and access: while some users have easily switched to alternative mobility options, others have remained dependent on PT, and had to navigate new and unevenly distributed challenges. Secondly, we refer to government responses, particularly in terms of funding arrangements, fare systems and controls, and labour organisation. Around the world, PT operators have faced unprecedented financial challenges, pressed to adapt their system to a, "new normality" while observing passenger flows decline drastically. As these problems have been particularly dire in transport networks that depend on a high share of fare-box revenue, a growing number of municipalities is considering a shift to fare-free PT. Thirdly, we discuss possible futures: While some commentators argue that PT faces an imminent decline due to mid-pandemic mobility needs and requirements, we argue that the role of urban public infrastructure is more vital than ever before, especially for underprivileged but recently acknowledged workers in the social and service sector. The paper brings together findings from an online study on mobility behaviour during COVID-19, interviews and policy analysis conducted by the research team from May to August 2020. In-depth investigations on Tallinn, Brussels, Stockholm and Berlin are brought into discussion with global scholarly and practitioners' reflections

Framing digital future : Selective formalization and legitimation of ridehailing platforms in Estonia

The contribution of the paper to the geographical literatures on informalities is to expand the work on transport informalities from transport system reforms and professionalization of informal provisions such as minibus services or taxi provisions to ridehailing, including explicit discursive framings through which formalization operates. Ridehailing platforms have entered various cities around the world extra-legally, forcing public authorities to deal with them. While there is an emerging literature discussing various aspects of ridehailing and platform economies, the literature to date has not analyzed what kinds of discursive frames facilitate the legitimation of these businesses. Analyzing legitimation through frame analysis highlights the affective forcefulness of future visions configured around technology-oriented regulation, employment provision and digitalization. The article argues that the state acceptance of sharing platforms, together with the introduction of the legal framing for them, particularly gains strength from the frame promising digital future. In such policy-framing processes, sharing platforms’ extra-legal entry into the market as a form of “elite informality” becomes accepted instead of being considered illegal. This paper analyzes verbatim reports of debates regarding ridehailing legalization held at the Estonian parliament (Riigikogu) in April and September 2016. These verbatim reports represent a key event and arguably the most public part of the trajectory from Uber entering Estonia extra-legally in May 2015 to Estonia introducing the “Uber law” legalizing ridehailing in 2017.©2021 Elsevier. This manuscript version is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial–NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY–NC–ND 4.0) license, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

Strategies for relating diverse cities: A multi-sited individualising comparison of informality in Bafatá, Berlin and Tallinn

Anybody wishing to position Bafatá (Guinea-Bissau), Berlin (Germany) and Tallinn (Estonia) side by side would encounter a number of reasons why these cities should not be compared. To unmake such hesitations, this article offers a conceptual and methodological exploration of the ways in which these cities might be analysed comparatively through a methodological strategy termed multi-sited individualising comparison. This exploratory approach allows to talk across individual research projects in different sites. In applying this methodology to Bafatá, Berlin and Tallinn, the authors demonstrate how case studies in these different cities can be compared around a common interest, namely informal processes and their relations to states

Writing across contexts: urban informality and the state in Tallinn, Bafatá and Berlin

Urban research has long related informality to a lack of state capacity or a failure of institutions. This assumption not only fails to account for the heterogeneous institutional relations in which informality is embedded, but has also created a dividing line between states. Whereas some states are understood to manage urban development through functioning institutions, others, in this view, fail to regulate. To deconstruct such understandings, this article explores informal practices through a multi‐sited individualizing comparison between three case studies of water governance, parking regulation and dwelling regimes in Bafatá (Guinea‐Bissau), Tallinn (Estonia) and Berlin (Germany), respectively. Our approach to understanding informality starts from the negotiation and contestation of order between differently positioned actors in the continuous making of states. From this point of view, informality is inherent in the architecture of states––emerging through legal systems, embedded in negotiations between and within institutions, and based on conflicts between state regulations and prevailing norms. Tracing how order takes shape though negotiation, improvisation, co‐production and translation not only highlights how informality constitutes a modus operandi in the everyday workings of the state in all three cases, but also provides a way to talk across these cases, i.e. to bring them together in one frame of analysis and overcome their presumed incommensurability