Reading the Ezo: Report from Stadslab Tbilisi Urban Design Masterclass. Part II

Tbilisi, and central Tbilisi especially, is built behind its facades. Over the course of five days in one of Tbilisi’s most quickly-changing neighborhoods, the Stadslab Masterclass worked to understand the traditional Tbilisi courtyard, or ezo, one of the city’s most important physical and social structures.

Misguided Interventions

The situation as we see it now is that economic pressures – the same faced worldwide – are encouraging the disintegration of the courtyard community as a social institution, depriving Tbilisi of what could form the solid foundation of a strong, positive, equitable, and prosperous municipal future. Economic pressures, however, would have taken some time longer before posing a real threat to our study area had it not been for the intentional catalyst introduced by policymakers. Government intervention into our study area, as indicated before, and although well-intentioned, has to be evaluated at this point as more harmful than helpful.

Pedestrianization can only be deemed a success if the purposes of the final development match and address the needs of those most likely daily to walk there. On Aghmashenebeli, this is only debatably the case. Not to say there are no individual successes in the New Tiflis development; to be sure, there is a tangible positive impact for those able to take advantage of newfound tourist attention and raised rents and prices. The development is certainly popular to tourists and citizens alike as a clean, attractive, and relatively pricy café district. The question is whether a café district with a touristic bent was really the best use for the street or fulfilled the area’s most immediate needs. What was once a green and picturesque street has lost its tree and vine cover to strangely uninviting benches and expensive cafes, a change that can be heard lamented in conversation with families living just off the renovated street. As a result of the influx of foot traffic, and especially touristic foot traffic, many courtyards on the street itself keep their gates closed that through daytime would have been open before; cars are exiled from their owners’ yards on account of restricted access times; and rising prices encourage tourist-oriented businesses in buying out residential owners, further fracturing long-established communities. None of these need to be read as necessarily negative changes, but they certainly are changes for many residents’ ways of life, often quite uncomfortable ones, with the potential for causing much more significant and uncomfortable change in the future. Looking as an outsider it seems unclear whether those changes were truly justified or necessitated by the New Tifilis development as completed.

More obviously troubling is the disregard with which the aesthetic restoration work itself was undertaken. On the main street, facades that ought to have been regarded as shared cultural heritage were not restored, but replaced. Cheap materials and shoddy craftsmanship are painfully obvious at, if not the first, then certainly the second glance. The end result is certainly better than earlier attempts at renovation – further north on Aghmashenebeli, for instance, or even more painfully in the district below Narikala – and it should be granted that the government made at least an effort to consider conservation in their selection of tenders. Nevertheless, that same municipal government insisted the actual work be completed before elections, a time frame that made meaningful conservation of the street’s once-gorgeous Art Nouveau facades essentially impossible. A lack of worker oversight sealed the street’s fate. The sitting government did win its return, so perhaps, despite our criticisms, we will have to admit that the project did succeed in its political aims. But it remains in many ways ill-conceived, socially harmful, and architecturally inadequate. That is to say, for the city and nation as cultural inheritors, for the neighborhood as a whole, for the wide swath of households living within walking distance of a newly walkable street, it remains difficult from an urban design perspective to view this as a success.

A Tale of Two Courtyards

Perhaps counterintuitively, an ideal foil for the New Tiflis project exists in the form of Fabrika, a private development located only blocks away and opened at roughly the same time. Fabrika has taken over a previously closed space, a Soviet-era sewing factory, and opened it to the entire city. Its own inner space has been transformed into a new, publicly accessible ‘courtyard’. Despite its unabashed market-oriented and commercial purpose, inflated prices, and entirely private ownership, Fabrika arguably serves a more successful public role than the ostensibly social New Tiflis does. This is perhaps precisely because it confines its interventions to a particular purpose, to private building stock and to the semi-public space of a courtyard, rather than intruding upon the fully public space of the street. Despite its touristic function – it is advertised primarily as a hostel, and a massive one at that – Fabrika seems to engage with the Tbilisi community far more effectively than New Tiflis does, not least with an array of second-location storefronts for locally owned businesses. Its owners, moreover, appear to have taken seriously their role as agents of historic preservation, maintaining and even highlighting the industrial heritage of its building for the benefit of visitors and citizens alike.

The comparisons raise important questions for policy makers, developers, designers and preservationists going forward. It isn’t clear that the public sector is the most effective agent for responsible intervention in Tbilisi’s core. Neither, though, can the private sector be looked to for the necessary maintenance of individual buildings and courtyards that, legally, the city does provide. We certainly are not presuming to offer complete solutions as a result of our short study period. The best we can offer is frank observations and enthusiastic ideas. If only by contributing a new set of eyes and fresh perspectives to what we know is already a vigorous discussion, we hope we can contribute in some small positive way to an ever-more lovely Tbilisi.

The Stadslab European Urban Design Laboratory is a Dutch think tank and design lab for cities, connected to Fontys University (www.Stadslab.eu). The workshop was co-organized by Tbilisi-based NGO Urban Experiments Group.

This two-part article serves both as a basic introduction to the topic for new Tbiliselebi and interested outsiders, and as a very brief report back to our host city.

Robert Isaf and the Stadslab European Urban Design Laboratory