Founded in 1946, Kohtla-Järve resembles hundreds of mining towns across the former Soviet Union: all of them developed under advantageous conditions, but now facing problems typical to rust-belt zones. The neglected buildings in Kohtla-Järve have scarred the urban fabric for 20 years, and the city has only managed to tear down some of them. Most of these abandoned houses remain as symbols of the radical change in socio-economic system, from central planning to a market economy. Production of oil-shale in the area has dropped by half, but still accounts for roughly 90 % of Estonia’s total energy production—Kohtla-Järve has thus avoided becoming a ghost-town, but because of the difficult financial situation only cosmetic changes take place in the townscape. Urban renewal happened fast, for a while, but has now come almost to a complete halt. This chapter combines two levels of analysis: one, an abstract cartographical analysis of the townscape development, particularly in terms of physical buildings; and two, an account of insiders’ life-course and quotidian movements, drawing also on my own personal experience. Combining quantitative and qualitative data in this way might further an improved understanding of urban landscape renewal—and standstill. Shifting between scales, the argument also highlights how apparent rupture or continuity may be an artefact of analytical frames.
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Whenever confronted with my incompetence about my birth and home place, I have always received invaluable input from my miner Dad and my chemist Mom. I thank the two anonymous reviewers and the editors of this volume for their enormous patience. This research was supported by the European Union through the European Regional Development Fund (Centre of Excellence in Cultural Theory), the Estonian Ministry of Education target-financed project no. SF0130033s07 Landscape Practice and Heritage and the Estonian Research Council institutional research funding project IUT3-2 Culturescapes in Transformation: Towards an Integrated Theory of Meaning Making.
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Authors and Affiliations
Centre for Landscape and Culture, Estonian Institute of Humanities, Tallinn University, Tallinn, Estonia
