Remont: housing adaptation as meaningful practice of space production in post-Soviet Tajikistan

Abstract

The proposed paper deals with multiple facets of the notion of remont, exploring urban space production in contemporary Tajikistan. Remont has come to bear in the post-Soviet Tajik context a wide range of meaning, in some way parallel to a Lefebvrian tripartite understanding of the production of space: Remont as perception refers to a good or a bad state of upkeep. Remont as conception refers to the desire to attain a certain remont status. Remont as adaptation refers to the activity being undertaken to reach this status. In this regard, remont is not only about attending to shortcomings, but is an active engagement with space, and a culturally embedded creative practice, aimed at reaching a normative set of spatial morality. I argue that the measure against which the need for remont is weighted, is obodi – beauty and habitability created by men’s hands. By means of remont, obodi is being enacted in Tajikistan’s urban space. Being a vector of spatial morality, remont is intimately tied to life-cycle rituals such as circumcisions, weddings and funerals, and thus takes part in projections and negotiations of modernity in post-Soviet urban Central Asia.

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