Чи змінюється міське планування в Білорусі? Досвід Бреста

Abstract

For long urban planning in post-Soviet Europe has missed scholarly attention in international urban studies, though it has changed fundamentally in the last three decades. The systemic upheaval in the early 1990s questioned the basics of the Soviet mode of modernist urban planning. The latter relied on the quantification and predictability of people’s needs, a strong state power and law enforcement through centralized planning, control and resources management (e.g. property). The latest since the 2010s, urban planning revives in the non-EU Eastern European states: ‘New’ urban planning instruments emerge; the so far sidelined citizens voice increasingly their interests; urban planning becomes an important arena for the contention and (re)production of both, the daily livelihood and the broader state-society relations often impregnated by (authoritarian) neoliberalism. The paper takes up this general observation and explores the example of Brest in Belarus. It reviews the local planning approaches (i.e. instruments, contents and processes) in Brest and discusses how they blend in the current EU and post-Soviet debates. The paper concludes that the Brest planning (re)produces a mode of gradual post-Soviet transformation: It displays a surprising familiarity with EU leitmotifs (contents) and principles (e.g. law enforcement and state subsidies) for urban planning. At the same time, it confronts with the benefits and constraints of maintained Soviet planning traits, e.g. with the high professionalism and the centrality of state planning hierarchies. The case of Brest reveals how local stakeholder alliances co-produce new opportunities for local urban planning and thus for an incremental change in Belarusian planning by engaging with the central state institutions as well as with the international debates.