'Doma Kultury'

Regeneration of Soviet socio-cultural centres into new urban nodes

Irina Irbitskaya, Center of Urban Competence, Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Admin.

The transformation of the socio-cultural infrastructure erected in the state-socialist period of the Soviet Union into local activity centers corresponding to the needs of contemporary society is one of the pertinent topics of the current urban planning in Russia. It includes various activities such as turning the excluded territories of schools and kindergartens into neighborhood centers; resetting the entire district life by transformation of the ‘doma kultury’; improving the diversity and the quality of social services and the quality of the urban environment while reducing the load on the municipal budget by attracting quality investment into the districts. The lecture will present a method of evolutionary transformation of the urban environment through the social and spatial transformation of a ‘dom kultury’ which initially was the cultural and educational centre provided by the Soviet state to a settlement or a city. The main goal of the proposed approach is to preserve the traditions kept in the territory of ‘dom kultury’ while giving it a new identity and bringing in an innovation. Irbitskaya will explain how to make an inventory of the traditions around the existing object by describing the way it functions, its relationship with the surrounding space, its attitude to the past and the future. Re-programming of the object will be discussed, as well as the tools to expand it spatially. Financial and management models will be proposed for all phases of the project metabolism (launch, implementation, use and adaptation), explaining how the emphases shift depending on the growth or decline of the economy.

Irina Irbitskaya is an architect and urban planner. She is a director of Center of Urban Competence at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA) with the expertise in housing projects and urban development and planning advancement. She is a co-funder and a principal architect of Platforma, a strategic consulting and conceptual spatial and architectural design office.

You are kindly invited to the lecture and the discussion that will follow.
More info at info@uirs.si.