Appropriate, Adapt, Inhabit: The Recreation of Public Space in the Republic of Georgia

Abstract

The collapse of the Soviet Union marked the beginning of the difficult deconstruction of the regime and ideology which controlled the East for the majority of the 20th Century. In the Republic of Georgia, Soviet collapse catalyzed a series of ethnically prompted conflicts and civil war which prevented the unification of the country under a national agenda, thus creating fertile ground for corruption, privatization and sale of public space. The earliest example of the corrupt transfer of property was the sale of the former Palace of Rituals, in Tbilisi, to Georgian oligarch Badri Patarkatsishvili, which is still primarily used as a private residence by his family. After the Rose Revolution in 2003, Georgia faced rapid institutional reforms under President Mikheil Saakashvili, who legitimized his regime by unifying regions that continuously identified as Georgian (excluding territories Abkhazia and S. Ossetia), collecting revenues via taxation, and attracting the foreign investment that Georgia desperately neede