The Tenants

A unique photographic essay on mass housing estates erected in the former Eastern Bloc and the people who live in them. From Berlin to Norilsk, and all the way through Almaty to Tallinn, the album portrays the inhabitants of over 40 housing complexes in 37 different cities, holding paper models of their homes, while sharing the stories of the lives they lived in the prefab panel blocks.

Mass housing in post-war socialist countries was a quick and effective way to provide homes for the expanding city populations after WWII, but after the collapse of the Soviet Bloc the fate of these constructions became uncertain. While modernist estates are being renovated or prematurely demolished, their tenants remain undaunted. They have lived through the buildings’ golden years and darker times.

Includes a foreword by the sociologist and urban researcher Maciej Frąckowiak and an index of the featured housing estates, providing an insight into their history. The portraits were taken by David Navarro and Martyna Sobecka, with contributions by local photographers.

Featured cities: Almaty, Belgrade, Berlin, Budapest, Chișinău, Dresden, Gdańsk, Halle-Neustadt, Kaliningrad, Katowice, Kraków, Kyiv, Ljubljana, Lviv, Łódź, Międzyrzecz, Minsk, Moscow, Norilsk, Omsk, Podgorica, Poznań, Prague, Riga, Rostock, St. Petersburg, Skopje, Sofia, Szczecin, Tallinn, Tbilisi, Vilnius, Vorkuta, Warsaw, Wrocław, Yakutsk, Żyrardów.