Neighboring alone? Digitally mediated communal life in a post-socialist large housing estate

The dissertation examines the arrangement of communal neighborly life, drawing on the case of a newly constructed large housing estate in St. Petersburg (Russia) known for its poor reputation and low-quality material environment. The research advances the pragmatic approach to studying urban neighboring (Martin 2003; Studdert 2006, Laurier et al. 2002, Blokland 2017) by drawing on material semiotics intuitions (Mol 2010). The main focus of the dissertation is how neighborly communal life is constituted in a post-socialist large housing estate. In four chapters, the research elaborates on various everyday neighboring practices, communications, language categories, and digital mediations to examine how the residents attempt to maintain the shared place and infrastructures and how their communal life becomes achieved and articulated. The author argues that communal neighborly life in a large housing estate is something that the residents actively create and maintain through digital mediation. This study advances the debate on post-socialist urbanity and contributes to understanding what it means to be neighbors. It discovers matters of collective concern and approaches to deal with them in public spaces and private apartments, questioning the boundary between public and private life in the neighborhood. The findings also emphasize the online/offline hybridity of neighborly practices.