29 May – 6 June 2025

How do Latvian institutions, residents, and places of everyday life shape the resilience of socialist-era housing? Our team, Elena Batunova and Albina Davletshina, spent a week in Daugavpils to find out, holding 20 hours of interviews (16 with experts and 4 with residents) and covering 80 km on foot through socialist estates, historical city areas, courtyards, public spaces and local museums.

Over eight days we met with departments of development, urban planning, property and municipal services, the city housing management company (PŽKH), a city council deputy, the Daugavpils Fortress, the Local History and Art Museum, and Daugavpils University’s Centre of Social Research. We also walked mass-housing districts, visited the Culture Palace, attended an international forum-discussion dedicated to the preservation and development of cultural and historical heritage and joined the city-festival weekend, observing how institutions and everyday practices meet in public space and common areas. 

A highlight was our closing workshop at City Council (6 June). After presenting first observations from the field, we invited participants to a short, written reflection on two concepts: resilience and sustainability. One line captured the mood of the room: “The basis of resilience is the will.” The discussion circled around building condition and maintenance, layered property ownership, tensions between regulatory frameworks (heritage, housing, infrastructure), and the very tangible ethics of care—both institutional and personal—that we kept encountering in stairwells, yards, and shared spaces. 

We’re following up with departments and partners in Daugavpils to deepen the conversation on tools that make resilient, inclusive renovation possible—especially for older and lower-income residents—and to prepare comparative exchanges with our other case cities.