Justice in Space? The restitution of property rights in Tallinn,Estonia

Abstract

This paper examines the social conflicts accompanying the restitution of residential property to those who owned it prior to the Soviet occupation of Estonia in 1940. As restitution re-establishes private property rights over residential space which has been in public ownership and used by renters for the last half-century, it is laden with conflicts between renters and owners. These conflicts centre on the question of whether or not restitution is socially just. This paper analyses the arguments for and against restitution, drawing on evidence from the local press over the 1990s, and then utilizes Lefebvre’s concept of the abstraction of space to theorize the current social conflicts in Tallinn. I argue that, even though the conflicts involve issues of ethnicity and citizenship by juxtaposing owners and renters from different ethnic groups and different countries, these conflicts are not over ethnicity and citizenship as such but stem from a fundamental contradiction between the use and ownership of space. By imposing the abstract order of private property rights onto lived space, restitution represents the abstraction of space.