Dachas as Sites of Urban Home-Making and Hope in Russian-Speaking Narva, Estonia

This talk examines dachas as key sites of urban home-making and hope among Russian-speaking residents of Narva, Estonia. Based on ethnographic material collected between 2010-2018, it argues that dachas extend everyday urban life beyond the apartment and city core, functioning as spaces where material security, emotional attachment, and future orientation are actively cultivated. In a city shaped by Soviet industrialisation and post-Soviet deindustrialisation, dachas have provided continuity amid socio-economic uncertainty, offering food production, sociality, and embodied routines that anchor a sense of belonging. The presentation shows how home is made through repetitive practices of care, labour, and intergenerational transmission, rather than through formal property regimes or dominant narratives of urban regeneration. Importantly, dachas also emerge as sites of modest but persistent hope: not oriented toward upward mobility or return to past certainties, but toward sustaining livable futures in a marginalised urban borderland. By conceptualising dachas as urban home-making infrastructures, the talk contributes to broader debates on post-Soviet domesticity, everyday survival, and the spatial forms through which hope is maintained in contexts of prolonged uncertainty.

When: Monday, January 26, 2025, 5:30–7:00 PM

Link: https://rwth.zoom-x.de/j/63818881847?pwd=s0uRbZ3QaDrbgvhEHrgaizRUef0Pbo.1
Meeting-ID: 638 1888 1847
Kenncode: 084850