CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020
| Author | Khasanova, Gulnoza |
|---|---|
| Title | Visual Representation Of Dushanbe: A City That Never Gets Old |
| Summary | During its Soviet history from 1929 to 1991, Dushanbe turned from a rural settlement into a city, the industrial, political, and cultural center of the Tajik Republic. The disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991 brought about drastic changes to the status quo in Tajikistan, and the newly created sovereign state had to redefine its identity. Still, Dushanbe has preserved a substantial amount of Soviet architecture, which is disappearing year by year due to the decisions of public authorities. Facing the lack of transparency and dialogue on behalf of the decision makers, the residents of the city have initiated a discourse in the online realm, in social media, where they discuss their memories and the value of the city’s architecture through photos about Soviet Dushanbe. To understand how the residents perceive and relate to the architecture and urban space of the Soviet era in Dushanbe, this thesis explores the heritage discourse around those in the framework of memory studies and visual analysis. The main body of sources are photographs about the urban space and architecture from the Soviet period, preserved even after the independence in personal collections and recently shared in social media, and the discussion that has evolved around these. The thesis contrasts this discourse of private memories to the one initiated by the state and other public actors also applying images of the city as media and compares the modern image and the narrative of the city to the one established and maintained in the Soviet period both in visual media and in printed literature. Dushanbe as the capital city is seen by all actors as a product of Soviet architectural practices: it was born and developed during the Soviet Union, witnessed its collapse, and is thereby indispensably connected to the Soviet era. In the Soviet period, its image was based on that of a young city, and this image keeps on dominating the official discourse even today. This narrative, however, has led to the conclusion on behalf of the authorities that the city does not have any historically valuable architecture. The residents are not asked about the issue, they have no say in the decision making about urban development. The findings of the thesis, however, show that the residents have a strong opinion about the architecture and urban space of Dushanbe, but the failure to critically rethink the heritage value of the Soviet architecture has led to a complete disconnect between the state and the people, the latter being utterly unhappy with the recent direction of urban transformation. To bridge this gap, it would be essential for the state and the city leadership to explore the current heritage and memory discourse among the residents, which would help to understand the place and role of Soviet architecture in the twenty-first-century Dushanbe and could serve as the basis of decision making concerning the development of urban space. |
| Supervisor | Kulikov, Volodymyr; Mérai, Dóra |
| Department | Medieval Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2020/khasanova_gulnoza.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2021, Central European University