MASTER OF URBAN STUDIES 2024
Studio I: Urbanisation explores Paljassaare as part of the Urban Studies program at the Estonian Academy of Arts (EKA), bringing together full-time EKA and Erasmus students. The studio is focused on themes of “urban-rural” and urbanisation, bringing these topics out of the classroom and into the field – in this case to the Northern Tallinn peninsula of Paljassaare. Our studio has come a long way from the initial visit – some literature review and group research on specific areas of Paljassaare to more in-depth group projects and a final seven-hour-long journey around the peninsula to visit the sites and projects we individually worked on. And a diagonal trip through Estonia put many of the observations and questions that arose in Paljassaare into a broader regional context of Estonia and helped us understand the urbanisation processes happening in Paljassaare.
Paljassaare peninsula was closed-up and used for military purposes during the Soviet times and therefore unreachable for the residents for a very long time. It is used in many ways, but can also be considered a wasteland since many parts of the peninsula seem to remain unused.
Brian Rosa asks, “What is wasted in an urban wasteland, and to whom is this a problem” (Rosa 2016: 181), and gives the prompt insight, that, “these sites generally go overlooked and unmentioned, their classification as wasteland often occurs at the moment when development pressure makes reconfiguration profitable” (ibid.: 182).
The studio gave us the chance to look beyond this classification of wasteland and find many more and less hidden uses, give room to small details and observations and find countless layers: a former closed-up military zone, a nature conservation area (Natura 2000), a small neighbourhood on Laevastiku Street, a social housing building, a Salvation Army, a seaport, the Tallinn Water Works & Sewerage Management, a recycling plot, a sunken ship, abandoned buildings, hundreds of garages and Pikakari beach – to name just a few of the many places found there.
Our research process happened in three phases: we began with working together in the studio to find a general overview of places and topics to be found and understood in Paljassaare; secondly, we worked in three groups that we put together based on common interests, summed up in the mid-term under the concept of a “palimpsest”, and lastly we all found an individual site and point of interest that we spend the last part of the semester researching and then we presented under the title of “dream | land | fill”. The Studio combined both classical urbanist approaches and allowed us to conduct research using more creative and experimental formats.
Trying to grasp and explain Paljassaare to people who have never been here is not an easy task since we were only able to present fragments of this complex and diverse place that we studied for one semester. We, therefore, encourage everyone to seek out and discover this amazing peninsula and to find their own little treasured spot in Paljassaare.
Studio I: Urbanisation is tutored by Keiti Kljavin and Andra Aaloe.
Our heartfelt thanks as a group to Keiti and Andra for their enduring enthusiasm, patience and guidance during these explorations, and for giving us so much freedom to delve deeply and conduct our own research.
Rosa, B. (2016): Waste and value in urban transformation: Reflections on post-industrial ‘wasteland’ in Manchester, In: Global Garbage: Urban Imaginaries of Waste, Excess, and Abandonment, Routledge, Meissner, M. & Lindner, C. (ed.) (2016).
GALLERY