Introduction

Approaches to housing renewal in Estonia reflect the complex relationship between the spatial, physical and socio-cultural legacy affecting housing, and contemporary demands on the housing system. Since the social and economic transformation of the 1990s, a major theme of housing policy has been the improvement or restoration of neglected and dilapidated privately owned residential buildings, especially among the older stock. Interventions, including the introduction of energy efficient renewal schemes for home owners, have tended to focus on dealing with single privatised blocks rather than achieving larger-scale renewal. Progress towards more comprehensive area-based renewal has been slow and somewhat random, and often applied on a relatively small scale.

In terms of the profile of the housing stock, there are 656,000 dwellings in Estonia of which 198,000 are in Tallinn. Figure 6.1 shows the distribution of the stock by period of construction. Twenty four per cent of the total was built before 1946, 71 per cent from 1946 to 1990, and 4 per cent from 1991 onwards (Statistics Estonia, 2011; Tallinn City Government, 2011).

Large multi-storey blocks dating from the 1960s to the 1980s make up the majority of the housing stock in larger towns. In the capital city of Tallinn, which has 400,000 of the 1.3 million total population of Estonia, large blocks make up two thirds of the housing stock. In contrast, detached homes make up only 8 per cent of housing in Tallinn compared with 32 per cent in the rest of the country (Statistics Estonia, 2012.

The chapter opens with a brief review of the background to urban and housing renewal practices in the period following the 1991 societal transformation. An introduction to policies initiated in the 1990s and a more detailed examination of those from the 2000s set the scene for three case studies of renewal in the city of Tallinn and the small town of Rakvere.

The first case study considers the renewal of pre-Second World War residential buildings in high-density historic neighbourhoods of Tallinn, which had been expropriated from owners at the beginning of the socialist regime in the 1940s then restituted to their original owners or successors in the course of property ownership reform in the 1990s. It highlights the tensions between the renewal practices of individuals and related state initiatives in areas moving up in the market, and the potential of area-based approaches to preserve the city's residential cultural heritage.