Spaces of Trade in Tallinn: Uncertainty and Everyday Life

Abstract: The everyday survival of the other at the border between ‘East’ and ‘West’ is the object of this study. The country in-between, Estonia, is a ‘melting pot’ of Russian, Western and Nordic influence, what makes this zone an active, diverse, nevertheless invisible in the global awareness. The process of transition and rapid neoliberalization, which is characteristic for the post-socialist country such as Estonia, brings together number of side-effects, lots of redundant people, who could not adapt to the new regime, who speculate and trade. The investigation of ‘Russian’ semi-official spaces of trade in Estonian capital, Tallinn, reveals the values and defects of the open-air markets.  The thesis highlights the need to politicize the processes around the disappearing and/or transforming the open-air markets in the city. In spite of the fact, that the informal trading is often connected with poverty, illegality, low hygiene, distrust and crime, this work explores the alternative ways of trading, the power of immediacy and aesthetics in confrontation to the global capital. The architecture as the transversal practice cuts across the patterns of trading based on irresponsible consumerism and desire, and experiments with the original concept of the market with the dialogue in front. The speculative interventions are the sites of the common life, production and renewal.