A Socially Resilient Urban Transition? The Contested Landscapes of Apartment Building Extensions in Two Post-communist Cities

Even though social processes across the globe are increasingly being theorised through a resilience lens, this has rarely been the case within the domain of everyday life in the city. The resilience debate also remains highly geographically selective, as regions that have undergone far-reaching systemic change over the past 20 years-including the post-communist states of the former Soviet Union and eastern and central Europe (ECE)-generally remain omitted from it. In order to address such knowledge gaps, an investigation is made of the relationships between social resilience and micro-level socio-spatial change in the built environment of the post-communist city, by focusing on the institutional, spatial and economic underpinnings of apartment building extensions (ABEs) on multistorey residential buildings in the Macedonian capital of Skopje and the Georgian capital of Tbilisi. Both cities contain a wide variety of ABEs, whose reinforced concrete frame constructions often rival the host buildings in terms of size and function. By exploring the architectural and social landscapes created by the extensions, it is hoped to highlight their embeddedness in a set of policy decisions and coping strategies, as well as their controversial implications on the present and future use of urban space.