From apartments to land: fragmented property transitions in Soviet-era urban residential districts

Significant land boundary-setting initiatives emerged across post-Soviet countries at the end of the twentieth century as a result of shifting property regimes. For residential districts built during the Soviet era, this marked a profound transformation. The emergence of numerous small-scale owners and private and public interests in property reshaped how these areas are maintained and governed. Thus, the inherited spatial structures of Soviet mass housing have become sites of contestation and re-evaluation in the post-Soviet era.This paper examines a late-Soviet housing district in Irkutsk to trace spatial transformations following post-1991 privatization. While it rapidly enabled apartment privatization to become possible, the land beneath buildings remained subject to delayed and often ambiguous processes of legal recognition. The analysis shows how ownership changes have redefined the legal, spatial and institutional role of land in Soviet-era housing districts. Drawing on analysis of planning documents and local media sources from the 1990s and 2000s, the paper shows how shifts in ownership and limited municipal capacity produced fragmented land governance. The findings contribute to the debates on the meaning of transition by foregrounding land as a contested element of Soviet housing planning legacies.