Yerevan has greatly changed. It’s a claim you hear made by a variety of people. Opinions may differ however when the question is whether the city’s changing for the better or for the worse. Additional interpretations, reservations and comparisons are also to be expected when discussing the matter.

What is certain is that many things, at least in terms of their familiar appearance, have irretrievably gone by the wayside while the complex process and short lifespan of introduced innovations further disorients those with a desire to understand and analyze something. In any case, the temptation to describe and talk about the new urban realities is evident and it’s not by accident that more and more is being written about Yerevan, ranging from newspaper articles to investigative reports. Moreover, it’s not only what’s new and unfamiliar that’s interesting, but what’s old as well. In the context of the new state of affairs this raises a host of questions that need to be answered.

Modernization has often been equated with urbanization. Thus the city, as a completely new vital space and arena of new social relations, has a more than 100-year history of philosophical, sociological, cultural and other studies. When architectural edifices are included in the complex fabric of urban life it becomes possible to view architecture in the language of the urban experience, applying corresponding theoretical approaches. Semiotics is an example of this approach. The architectural structure, as like anything else, can be viewed on the level of the sign - removing the question of interpretation out of the traditional “architecture as art” point of view. The placement of urban edifices in the wide context of urban experience enriches architecture in terms of political and social dimensions, leaving it open to ever new semantic attributions and interpretations.

In this case the city can be perceived as a text that when read gives birth to new texts. As we know, descriptions of the city derived through different means (literature and the press, the cinema and photography) assist to form the city’s character and become a piece of its history and memory.

Georg Simmel on Urban Life

By the beginning of the twentieth century cities with over a million in population already existed. The largest was London with 7 million. The experience of Georg Simmel was tied to Berlin of the late 19th century. He was one of the first who attempted to explain certain unprecedented behavioral characteristics of urban dwellers. In a series published at the beginning of the 20th century (“The Metropolis and Mental Life” - 1903, “The Stranger” - 1908, “The Problem of Style” - 1908 and others), Simmel, by mostly conditioning the experience of the modern age by way of the changing relationships of proximity and distance, attempts to explain the amazing behavior of residents of very large cities. In contrast to small cities, the metropolis would create a voluntary state of anesthesia in its residents, a consciously dulled perception of urban life. 

At the base of his approach is the assumption that the urban environment, with its variety of impressions and impulses, the speed with which events occur and the abundance of mutual relations, could lead people to extreme irritability and an insufferable nervous state.

 A contemporary commentator observes that, “ ...the metropolitan rhythm of events was the cause of this agitated state, the solution or rather the strategy for coping with it lay with people seeking to create a distance between themselves and others, and, more broadly, from the rhythms of the city itself. Some kind of reserve or detachment of feeling was called for, if city life was to be ongoing.” (John Allen)

Simmel explains the state of affairs of the new metropolis with the help of a group of mutually linked concepts - distance, difference, strangeness and style. Accordingly, it is possible to define urban life as “life on a distance” or “the being with the stranger”, where by “stranger” we don’t mean “marginal” people. The figure of the stranger helps us to obtain a great deal of experience when it comes to understanding what is meant by socially interacting with someone, which in a spatial context is close by, whilst in a social context is far removed. Here, strangeness manifests itself as the embodiment of the unavoidable for the big city difference.

As is noted, the manifestations or grades of “strangeness” exist in all types of mutual relationships and it’s important to understand that in public life, “To acknowledge the presence of the remote, however, does not undermine Simmel’s understanding that the tension between near and far inscribed in forms of social interaction may be lived as involved difference. If we come at it from a different angle and consider the contemporary city to be a place where all may be ‘strangers’ to one another, it takes little imagination to realize that there are no ‘host’ groups to speak of: everyone belongs, but that does not make everyone the same or alleviate social distance.” (John Allen)

It is from this same viewpoint and with this quite unexpected form that style is interpreted. According to Simmel, style veils rather than exposes the personal, whilst behavior organized by a certain style, its external appearance and expression are social masks that conceal the ‘ego’.
“ It is if the ego could no longer carry itself, or at least no longer wished to show itself and thus put on a more general, a more typical, in short, a stylized costume ... Stylized expression, form of life, taste - all these are limitations and ways of creating a distance, in which the exaggerated subjectivism of the times finds a counterweight and concealment.” 

The Difference in “Ourselves"

I believe that Simmel’s thoughts on proximity and distance, difference (strangeness, the other) and regarding style can assist in attempting to understand the new urban state of affairs in present-day Yerevan. Of course, we cannot speak of directly applying his theoretical tools. The differences in conditions are so great that it obligates us to make a number of reservations.

When Simmel described the already formed image of the western metropolis it was a period of the maturation of modern society (which was still to find itself in a severe crisis stage). In addition to a number of other things, the long-term process of the stratification of society had reached a certain stage in the western city and resulted in an established system of social differences. It was this in particular that made the above-described perception of difference possible, the establishment of distance as relates to urban rhythms and social constraint, as the cultivation of essential components of urban life. It is understandable that in present-day Yerevan (that also has over one million residents) such differences haven’t yet been noticed and it’s also not appropriate to speak of the maddening rhythms of urban life. On the other hand, as the commentators observe, the social and physical limits in the age of informational and communicative technologies, are more open for communication while the circle of personal relations and the influences on them has taken on global scales of measure.

Now let me gather together those preconditions that I believe deal with the possibility of using the language described above. Before this I will very briefly describe what was inherited from the Soviet period. There were no cities in eastern Armenia during the pre-Soviet era nor were eastern Armenians linked to any type of capitalist development. This situation essentially changed during the Soviet period. Armenia possessed a developing industry according to Soviet standards but, on the other hand, the socialist ideal of a classless society didn’t allow for the stratification of society or for social differences to truly take shape. This coupled with the mono-ethnicity so endemic to Armenia, the near total absence of national minorities in Yerevan, were the preconditions that presaged only one portrayal of society from which was expunged the strange, the different and even the idea of the possibility of the different (even the ‘socialist’ wasn’t perceived as being a threat to the ‘national’, but that’s another topic all together).

It was on the radio that I heard an elderly woman displaced from her apartment located on the site of North Avenue (or Buzant Street) cry out, “What, am I not an Armenian?”  This was clearly a call for justice, as if being Armenian still meant something, much less equality.  The very expressive saying, “Aren’t we also Armenian?” of the Soviet years, now since forgotten, also speaks to the importance of common ethnic belonging.

Continuing to talk about the Soviet era, another circumstance must be underlined. The process of industrialization and the disintegration of the village gave rise to other preconditions for urban life including the loss of “nativeness” the loss of connection with place (one of the important themes in Hrant Matevosyan’s writings). The post-Soviet era also weakened the connection with the “homeland”, it completely threw open the country’s borders and introduced Armenians to the pleasures of global mobility. Today the Yerevan resident has changed due to the enriched, varied and oftentimes difficult experiences he or she now encounters, by living and working in a strange and alien environment, by a lifestyle practically unimaginable during the Soviet era. 

Not only has the city’s physical landscape changed and continues to change but so to has its social landscape as well. The signs of social stratification have started to appear as well. By stratification I don’t mean to say “classes” (although extreme polarities in society between severely rich and severely poor are evident), but rather what manifests as status groups in the accepted parlance of sociology. Such groups differ from one another according to socially chosen principles in that given society as well as by means of distinctive lifestyles, consumer capabilities and cultural preferences.

As I’ve stated, the coming into being of social difference is at the minimum evident in its supreme manifestations. On the one hand, the homeless and those whose social conditions are similar, and on the other hand, expensive cars, chain stores, places of entertainment and finally, the so-called ‘elite’ buildings and a complete North Avenue. I use the term ‘elite’ conditionally. Perhaps these are signs defining a ‘middle class’ whose mythical and long awaited appearance has not yet occurred.

Also telling is the circumstance that this social group utilizes the location of the city center as a way to distinguish themselves, where a geographical place turns into social location. Of course the reconstruction of Yerevan’s center is in the first place linked to the utilization of capital from dubious sources, the enlargement of profit derived from the centralization of the entertainment industry, the procurement of real estate and the artificial rise in its price, etc. But its both distinguishing and ironic that North Avenue, a provincial copy of the European urban standard setting, is becoming the embodiment of the other, the different for Yerevan, or at least on of its important signs.