Wandering Yerevan

The chapter investigates postsocialism’s perverse spatiality. The author shows how the transformations brought by the end of state socialism changed the spatial configurations of Yerevan, creating fragmentations through the privatization and organized abandonment of the city’s infrastructure to capital’s speculation, centered on private wealth rather than on public human needs. Exploring the discontinuities in new construction that disoriented and reoriented leisurely strolls (wandering) through the city, the author reflects on the feelings and experiences of perverse space that bring the contexts of sexual perversions (aylaserutyun) and larger moral deviations (aylandakutyun) into conversation with one another. This analysis of postsocialist space highlights how, against the backdrop of socialist centralized plans, capitalism can be understood as lacking a coherent or intelligible ideology, thus pointing to the emptiness in promises of capitalist development and official nationalist narratives of state and church.