Prime real estate: Dispossession and speculation in occupied Mariupol

After destroying a significant part of Mariupol’s urban infrastructure in 2022, Russia has announced a large-scale reconstruction project in the occupied city. The plans designate Mariupol as an urban frontier where fantasies of imperial expansion intersect with claims of historical continuity over the “new territories”. The act of rebuilding serves as a precondition to a series of interconnected processes, including capital accumulation for Russian business and state actors; the dispossession of locals of their property and history; and the consolidation of power by projecting control over the future. Analysing the occupying regime’s practices directed to Mariupol urban space as technologies of imagination deployed to anticipate, facilitate and administer the future (Bear 2020), my paper asks how the built environment becomes an instrument of colonial domination, and how temporalities of speculation and occupation interact in the aftermath of violence.

Anna Balazs is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies, Södertörn University. She received her PhD in social anthropology at the University of Manchester in 2020. Her work focuses on the infrastructural and cultural legacies of socialism in Eastern European cities, and the temporalities of geopolitical conflict in Ukraine.