Revisiting the Planning and Design of Socialist-Era Housing Estates in Estonia
Dr. Daniel B. Hess, Visiting Scholar at the UT Centre for Urban and Migration Studies
In his presentation Dr. Hess reviews the socialist-era program in Estonia to construct large housing estates and explores several important themes, including the influence of city planning/architecture strategies from abroad.
Daniel B. Hess, PhD, is Associate Professor in the School of Architecture and Planning at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. He is currently Marie Skłodowska-Curie International Fellow and Visiting Scholar in the Centre for Urban and Migration Studies at the University of Tartu. His research in the Baltic States, begun when he was a Fulbright Scholar at Tallinn University of Technology, enhances scholarship on market-led urban transformation amid the complexity of post-socialist urban space and focuses on two themes: (1) understanding how the legacy of town planning and the wide-ranging effects of various occupations affect local and national planning systems and planning practice, and (2) understanding housing systems and historical and current population dynamics to explore the effects of inherited segmentation from Soviet times.