Dystopia of DiY-urbanism vs the utopia of partisan urbanism

The article discusses modern microurban approaches to changing the urban environment. The concept of DiY-urbanism, which is based on the idea of independent creativity of residents to improve the urban environment, is considered based on the study of cases – materials from the two-day workshop “DiY-weekend in Kaliningrad. Designing urban spaces” (2016) and the sociocultural phenomenon of housing and communal services art. This approach is contrasted with guerrilla urbanism – a utopia that involves informal and unauthorized changes in urban space. An example of the implementation of this approach can be considered one of the tallest private wooden buildings in Russia – the Sutyagin House as an allegory of the utopian approach to architecture. Consciously or unconsciously, all these approaches appeal to symbolic reality and encourage the construction of a prototype of an ideal future that can be realized in reality. And this impulse can be embodied both in the discourse of utopia and in the discourse of dystopia. The article makes an attempt to compare and analyze the noted microurban approaches, to identify their features, in order to conceptualize the sociocultural phenomena under consideration and actualize their influence on the formation of the urban environment.

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