“The Sense of the Fence”: Territorial (Re)production, Normativity and In/visibility in the Public Spaces of Modernist Housing Estates

This article focuses on the material components of public space, e.g. walls, fences, and grids, and shows how they can be seen from an analytical point of view as active components of the (re)production of space. Based on illustrative cases from my long-term fieldwork in a modernist housing estate, I explore what roles physical barriers play in the constitution of various (in)visible relations between the inhabitants, spatial practices and, of course, the socio-material environment. For this purpose I operationalise and further extend Kärrholm’s concept of “territorial (re)productions”. This approach allows me to grasp processuality and relativity as well as the effects of constant (re)production of territoriality in the micro-context of the post-socialist modernist space. From this point of view, both human and nonhuman components (individuals, public space amenities, natural entities) of the reality are in continuous interaction. The housing estate is (re)produced by individual, collective and often (in)visible manifestations of Right to the City. These manifestations mirror the assemblage that is spatio-temporally embedded in the hybrid interplay between residual principles of socialist modernist urbanism and socialist housing policies and the economic transformation, renaissance of private ownership and individualism which emerged after 1989. Altogether these regimes are appropriated through the processes of everyday territorial (re)productions in socio-material space.This article focuses on the material components of public space, e.g. walls, fences, and grids, and shows how they can be seen from an analytical point of view as active components of the (re)production of space. Based on illustrative cases from my long-term fieldwork in a modernist housing estate, I explore what roles physical barriers play in the constitution of various (in)visible relationsbetween the inhabitants, spatial practices and, of course, the socio-material environment. For this purpose I operationalise and further extend Kärrholm’s concept of “territorial (re)productions”. This approach allows me to grasp processuality and relativity as well as the effects of constant (re)production of territoriality in the micro-context of the post-socialist modernist space. From this point of view, both human and nonhuman components (individuals, public space amenities, natural entities) of the reality are in continuous interaction. The housing estate is (re)produced by individual, collective and often (in)visible manifestations of Right to the City. These manifestations mirror the assemblage that is spatio-temporally embedded in the hybrid interplay between residual principles of socialist modernist urbanism and socialist housing policiesand the economic transformation, renaissance of private ownership and individualism which emerged after 1989. Altogether these regimes are appropriated through the processes of everyday territorial (re)productions in socio-material space