Exactly five years ago—which seems an extremely long time—I spent a month in Kuldīga, a small town in Latvia. This was as part of a ‘residency’ programme this town has for writers and artists, where they get put up in a house, live together for a few weeks, and some ‘work’ comes out of it at the end; in this case, a book by all the people living in the house about what they found in the town, which was never actually published (though each chapter has been published elsewhere).

I was not in the right frame of mind. Already depressed by a failed relationship, a broken laptop and no smartphone meant there was no distractions and no link to home but postcards and text messages. One of many settlements in Latvia founded by the Hanseatic League, as ‘Goldingen’, Kuldīga was a minor industrial centre in the twentieth century, a centre of the 1905 revolution in the Russian Empire and a 1919 socialist revolt crushed by the German Freikorps, to which there were abundant, sometimes heroic and sometimes morbid monuments all over town.

The residency posed a question, which I felt like we were meant to answer but couldn’t – what good does it do a town like this to pay for a load of ‘creatives’ to hang out for a few weeks? It was clear what we got out of it—a very cheap holiday somewhere very pleasant—but what was in it for them?

Not particularly sociable at the best of times, I didn’t exactly set out to find out the answer; and Latvians are not a voluble lot either. The closest I ever got to making friends with Kuldīga residents was when meeting a group of local photographers for the book project – they were used to showing off the beautiful wooden buildings left to the era by the Hansa, not to my requests they photograph the two small Soviet housing estates on the outskirts, though they went and did the job anyway. But looking more closely you could see ways in which the attempt to make an (ahem) ‘creative cluster’ out of this place had interesting effects.

In the main square, opposite Kuldīga’s grand synagogue, recently restored (albeit as a library) was a huge wooden cat which housed a museum by a local group who tried to retell the town’s history if Latvia had been ruled after 1917 by the socialist feminist poet Aspazija and become a pioneer of a feminised leftwing modernism, a romantic and productive alternative to its twentieth century reality as a football kicked between fascism and Stalinism. I thought of this wonderful little project on reading Anete Ušča and Liana Ivete Benke’s Baltic Stories, a new book which tries to showcase democratic, participatory, and egalitarian art projects and urban collectives in Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia.

The region is one of the most interesting parts of Europe, profoundly shaped by a multicultural history which was destroyed by nationalism and, especially, the Holocaust (though there is still a large Russophone population in Latvia and Estonia). There is lovely flat countryside, long coastlines, and rich architecture of all eras, whether Gothic, Dutch baroque, Tsarist classical, 1920s moderne (especially in Lithuania’s art deco ‘temporary capital’, Kaunas) and some very imaginative 1970s Soviet modernism. But its post-communist politics are caught mostly in a loop of neoliberalism and nationalism, with little in the way of a local labour movement or a left of any significance – still identified with a Soviet ‘occupation’ which was astonishingly brutal in the 1940s and ’50s.

People will often talk about how the effects of the Soviet era, followed by the economic collapse of the 1990s, have left a distrust of public space, public institutions, and collective action, with people concentrating on getting on for themselves and their own families. Although it has never returned to the nadir of the ’90s, all three countries, especially Latvia, were hit hard by the financial crash and have faced widespread emigration, which has challenged the future of small towns like Kuldīga. Most now face either becoming tourist centres if they’re lucky, or declining into failed Soviet ‘monotowns’. Baltic Stories starts from this problem of atomisation and distrust, and shows the ways in which people are setting out to solve it for themselves, largely without the ’90s utopia of the ‘free market’ to help out.

A lot of the interest in Baltic Stories comes from the way that so many the examples are in the places that will always be ignored by tourism – which has been concentrated in the three big capital cities of Vilnius, Riga, and Tallinn, and is often of the rather seedy variety favoured by British ‘lads’. The Kuldīga residency is in there, but so is a project for community gardens in large Soviet concrete panel housing estates in Estonia, another artists ‘residency’ in the high-rises of Visagainas, Lithuania (a town built around a nuclear power plant, and best known for being the set of the HBO Chernobyl series), a punk radio station in a declining resort in Palanga, a zero waste project in the pretty Gothic town of Cesis, and Free Riga, which occupies disused spaces in the Latvian capital.

These are all very interesting projects in their own right, and provide something which, by and large, neither the extremely marketised local economies or the more egalitarian but heavily bureaucratic Soviet system could normally allow space for. There’s a sense in which they resemble a much nicer version of the sort of ‘regeneration’ strategies familiar here in the North and Midlands, south Wales, central Scotland, or in Dockland areas of London – solving the collapse of local industrial economies through trying to produce new ‘creative’ communities. They are nearly all projects of NGOs and charities, and have the limitations that you’d expect from this – everything is about ‘bringing people together’, which is lovely, but in societies like these, there is always one class that benefits—on the eve of the boom, real estate in the resort of Jurmala, Latvia, was as expensive as in Monte Carlo!—and another that does not.

Those inequalities are strongly emphasised in an English/Latvian book series published by Orbita, a Russian-Latvian poetry collective who are featured in Baltic Stories. ‘Public Space’ consists of four photobooks (full disclosure – the most recent is a translation of my own essays about the region) which concentrate on the more difficult historical legacies in Latvia’s built environment. One of them, Vladimir Svetlov’s Rīgas Līcis, is a series of glamorous mocked-up glossy photos of actors playing patients in a Soviet sanatorium, parodic technicolour versions of the country’s seventies elite – but the other two are harsher.

Andrejs Strokins’ Palladium is a book of haunting, uneasy ‘found’ photographs of a post-war cinema and social club and its audience, with staring audiences and stiffly dressed people in front of propaganda posters – images of regimented leisure and rather touching high-mindedness. Mara Brašmane’s Centrāltirgus is on Riga’s monumental central market, a project of the interwar independent republic – a series of enormous hangers, one of Europe’s great public spaces, but one where poverty is unavoidable. These pictures move sequentially from 1965 to 2017, from the seedy underbelly of Soviet Latvia to the poverty that EU membership has in no way eradicated. These three books all take a rather darker approach to the question of what happened to public spaces in the region, and why it is people might be suspicious of them.

But the fact remains that whatever their flaws, the projects profiled in Baltic Stories have almost certainly made a positive difference to places which would otherwise have been left to decline and rot. The best of them evoke the 1970s-1980s idea of the ‘People’s Plan’ – that is, beginning not from what the planner assumes people want or what the state’s central plan requires, but from what residents who are already there feel is missing from their lives and their economies, putting them as much as possible in charge. If taken further, this is a much more radical idea about what could happen to public space in the Baltic than some of the people funding it might have bargained for.