Post-Soviet Urban Transformation and Historical Memory Representation in Georgia and Latvia (Poti and Liepāja)

This dissertation thesis traces the manifestation of emotions evoked by the memory of political ideologies and the modern social context in the lives and perceptions of citizens of Poti and Liepāja in the cities of Georgia and Latvia. Those are emotions that determine the modern cultural and moral situation of these urban areas. The thesis discusses how the infrastructure, landscape, and architecture of the cities are discussed with social emotions, whose sensory perceptions expose the locals to pride, shame, and uncertainty, in the context of understanding spatial construction and memory, through variations in the visibility and legitimization of ideologies, their social interpretations, and urban-spatial reactions. The ethnographic research conducted in Liepāja and Poti between 2019 and 2023 demonstrates how individuals interacted with an architectural landscape that constituted zones of legitimacy for tsarist imperialism, Soviet socialism, nationalism, post-socialism, and/or neoliberalism. The ethnographic study of post-socialist and neoliberal cities is related to the Georgian and Latvian urban experience and the practice of their everyday understanding to demonstrate the moral articulation of the understanding of the architectural environment, in the simultaneously connected and different cities of Georgia and Latvia.
The dissertation demonstrates how ideologies and their experiences affect human perceptions and emotions on the one hand and how everyday life is portrayed on the other through an understanding of the morality of urban infrastructure. The industrial, military, cultural, social, and port infrastructure established in the city's geographical areas is specifically depicted. Their modification and transformation give people the impression that the emotional understanding of the spaces formed under post-socialist transformational conditions and/or as a result of further developed processes are tools for discussing infrastructure depreciation, destruction, creation, industrial privatization, and transformation. The work is an anthropological study based on the analysis of the ethnographic material. It demonstrates the social and cultural instability of the symbolic representation of political power. As a result, I argue that it is possible to see the temporal nature of the practice of the visibility of ideologies through people's relationships with culturally and historically shaped infrastructure, where urban infrastructure as well as human emotional states adapt to the contemporary social and cultural order.