Temporal and Spatial Dynamics of the New Residential Areas around Tallinn

New housing construction is the most visible manifestation of the rapid suburbanization process taking place in the former centrally planned countries of Central Eastern Europe. This paper analyses residential housing construction around Tallinn, the capital city of Estonia, in the period 1991–2005. Our data comes from the New Residential Area Survey that was carried out in 2006. The main results of the study reveal that housing construction was modest in the 1990s, but grew rapidly in the 2000s. In comparison with the Soviet period, private interest led new housing construction to take place in areas closer to Tallinn that were earlier reserved for other functions; that is former agricultural and coastal (often military) areas. Instead of the sprawl of detached housing further away from the capital city seen over time, we find increasing in-fills and multifamily housing construction in the 2000s around Tallinn. This leads to changes both in the internal structure (small but merging settlements close to Tallinn are different from the Soviet time compact settlements located all over the rural areas) and functioning (increase in daily commuting) of the metropolitan area. We argue that the transition period ends in the housing market when a new and better balance between public and private interests emerges in Estonia like in Western Europe.     

SUBURBANIZATION IN COUNTRIES IN TRANSITION: DESTINATIONS OF SUBURBANIZERS IN THE TALLINN METROPOLITAN AREA

Suburbanization is one of the key phenomena of spatial population change in many countries in transition. Yet we know surprisingly little about the population carrying out the post‐socialist suburbanization process. The objective of this article is to improve on this situation by studying the Tallinn metropolis in Estonia. Our analysis, which covers the inter‐censal period 1989 to 2000, focuses on the differences between population subgroups with respect to their probabilities to move to the suburbs. As such, it also clarifies choices of destination by dwelling and municipality type. For the analysis, we use individual anonymous 2000 census data and logistic regression. The results indicate that suburbanization was a socially polarizing process during this period. People with low social status had the highest probability to sub‐urbanize, and mainly occupied the pre‐existing housing stock. Conversely, people with high social status were less likely to move into suburban areas, yet when they did they moved to the most attractive destinations in the suburbs (new single‐family houses, coastal municipalities and municipalities closer to the city).