From Exception to Norm? Analysing Gated Housing in Sofia and Kiev since 1989

Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 it is time to start a broader reflection on one of the most debated types of housing in Eastern European urban studies. Gated housing was almost unknown in the 1990s but started spreading rapidly at the end of the 2000s in different Eastern European and Post-Soviet countries. However, the 2008–2009 global financial crisis led to a sharp decrease in housing construction in general and of gated communities in particular. In recent years, housing construction as well as housing prices have increased again. Gated communities are part of this recovery. Instead of providing insights from a certain period of boom or crisis, this paper looks at three decades of housing production in general and gated communities in particular. It tries to uncover the institutional and economic background of housing development over the last 30 years. Moreover, it relates these developments to two (South)-Eastern European capital cities (Sofia and Kiev [Kyiv]) and their pathways of housing and gated community production. We focus on politico-economic and socio-spatial relationalities in these two different context conditions and scrutinise why and how gated communities emerged as well as how supply and demand changed over time. Both cases represent rather peripheral, capitalist economies concerning their national background. However, both cases are capital cities, which absorb the majority of capital investment. The polarisation and concentration of political and economic power structures lead us to discuss different actor-constellations regarding this on-going flight to privatopia, reflecting on the role of urban planning as well as glocal housing markets. Last but not least, this paper shows that gated communities are “urban assemblages” of wider processes of peripherialisation.