Zhytlo: Creativity in the New Ukrainian Affordable Housing Market

• In Event: Land, Property, Ownership at the Imperial Crossroads I

Abstract

Zhytlo is the Ukrainian word for residential housing; it means home; it means the place where people live. To live: zhyty; the place where you live: zhytlo. But legally, what is a zhytlo? How does the use of that particular word affect the process of building housing in Ukraine? What timelines are attached to it as a legal concept? In my research with a Ukrainian NGO, about a month was spent waiting for the city government to approve and rewrite a housing lease so that it no longer said zhytlo; the use of this word actually prevented the timely completion of a project to build affordable housing. Instead, the word “hotel” was used. This paper examines the development of Ukraine’s new affordable rental housing scheme through the eyes of people navigating its uncertainties. Since the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian war in 2014 millions of Ukrainians have been displaced from their homes. These displaced people experience both dispossession and extreme uncertainty. While affordable housing technically exists in Ukrainian legislation, in reality it is practically non-existent. Ukrainian legislators, international consultants and donors, and Ukrainian NGOs have recently taken up the challenge of creating a pool of affordable housing for displaced people and other needy populations. But because these organizations are essentially creating a category of housing from scratch, building quickly and well, and distributing housing fairly, requires finesse and creativity. Can this creativity - playing with legal language, innovating building practices - be seen as a kind of liberation from imperialist property schemes? Can we think about these moments of creativity as “weapons of the weak”? My interlocutors are engaged in creating affordable housing seemingly from scratch - but in the process they engage with a long history of communal housing, privatization, and attempts to put affordable housing into legislation - that is, into words – but not into action. How do they work with and around this history to create something meaningful - to create a “zhytlo” in the broadest sense?

Author

• Sofia Pinedo-Padoch, Inst for Social Anthropology (Germany)