‘Reconstruction-plus-regeneration-plus-adaptation’: transforming old Tbilisi during and after socialism

Abstract

Abstract In the late 1970s, the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic was widely recognised across the socialist world as a leader in urban heritage conservation. Its capital city, Tbilisi, became a showcase of what Chief Architect Shota Kavlashvili defined as a new formula for historic district revival: ‘reconstruction-plus-regeneration-plus-adaptation’, an approach that broke from the modernist orthodoxy of the Venice Charter in its prioritisation of aesthetic coherence over material authenticity. This article traces the continuities of Kavlashvili’s method through the turbulent 1990s, an era that necessarily broke from Soviet precedents in the wake of the Civil War, but also built upon and transformed them during the reconstruction process. While much attention has been paid to the dramatic architectural interventions and wholesale historic district restorations initiated by President Mikheil Saakashvili in the early 2010s, the 1990s remain an overlooked Dark Age in a city where reconstruction-plus-regeneration-plus-adaptation continues to dominate urban conservation projects. In comparing Kavlashvili’s pilot project at Baratashvili Street to the post-conflict reconstruction of Rustaveli Avenue and the ‘New Life for Old Tbilisi’ program inaugurated under President Mikhail Saakashvili, this article demonstrates that Soviet urban conservation approaches continue to exert a profound legacy on postsocialist Tbilisi, even as those same approaches are used to erase Soviet contributions to its historic landscape.