In his recently published article "“Unsure whether it feels like home anymore”: Unsettled feelings amongst former panel-block residents in Moscow and Berlin" (Ethnography OnlineFirst, May 19, 2025), anthropologist and filmmaker Gregory Gan explores these questions through an ethnographic study. His focus lies on individuals whose former apartments in Soviet panel buildings in Moscow are potentially threatened by demolition due to the state-led renovation program (renovatsiya)—and who are grappling with the prospect of this loss.

Drawing on affect theory concepts such as displacement, dispossession, and disaffection, Gan shows how state-driven urban development can produce ambivalent and often contradictory emotional responses. The panel block (khrushchyovka) emerges as a powerful site of memory and emotional attachment—even when its future is uncertain. By shedding light on the subjective aftereffects of urban change, Gan invites us to rethink the close relationship between space, memory, and belonging:

“I consider Renovatsiya to be an “affective arrangement” that reaffirmed political affinities, normalized dispossession, and kept people in a perpetual state of suspense. The campaign could therefore be considered “cruelly optimistic”, because alongside promises of improved living conditions, it turned familiar neighbourhoods into sites of interminable demolition and construction.”

This study makes an important contribution to current debates in affect theory, urban anthropology, and housing research—and shows that home is not merely a spatial arrangement, but a historically and emotionally charged concept that extends far beyond the concrete realities of habitation.

In the closing section of the article, Gan draws a cautious but powerful connection to the war in Ukraine:

“A state power that systematically dispossesses and displaces millions while claiming to liberate them has since multiplied its own violence manifold, upending lives, livelihoods, and homes, and severing transnational relations of an increasingly tenuous world order. It would be cynical to equivocate Muscovites experiencing dispossession to people surviving war; rather, I consider Revonatsiya as a premonition of an increasingly emboldened state to engineer its own sense of morality and instrumentalize affect in the service of power.”

The article thus underscores how seemingly mundane processes of urban redevelopment can presage—and participate in—a broader political machinery of affective control and displacement.

Gregory Gan is a former fellow of the CRC “Affective Societies.” During his time at the CRC, he worked on the project "Picturing Postsocialism: A visual anthropology study on the affective dimensions of ‘renovation’ of panel homes in Moscow and Berlin".