Recently, Sjöberg and Gentile generalised the priority mechanisms that shaped the settlement systems and individual cities in countries that were formerly centrally planned. The paper adds the metropolitan level to those macro and microlevel approaches, and links the priority approach to a more general theory of the urban life cycle (Van den Berg and colleagues) in order to understand the processes of population change in this group of countries. The empirical content of the paper comes from the Tallinn metropolitan area (TMA), Estonia. We demonstrate through our analysis how the key metropolitan actors (families, companies, and the public sector) guided metropolitan residential change in the course of the late-Soviet (1980s), transition (1990s), and post-transition (present) decades. First, the priorities of the communist regime shaped the spatial structure of the TMA and the residential changes that have occurred in the post-communist period have been affected by the Soviet-era suburban housing stock and areas available for new developments around the city. Second, the passive attitude of the public authorities after 1991 increased the role of business actors in metropolitan dynamics. We exemplify how the changing balance of metropolitan actors interplays with inherited metropolitan space and shapes the residential choices set for families in the TMA. Copyright (c) 2009 by the Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG.

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The construction of new housing has been the most visible of all the spatial changes to have affected the post-socialist suburban landscape. It is argued in this article that former summer-home settlements are a hidden component of contemporary residential suburbanisation in former socialist countries. The building of summer or weekend homes ( dacha settlements in the former Soviet Union) around major cities for urban residents was a specific feature of socialist metropolitan planning. After removing construction restrictions, the stock of vacant dachas started to support the supply side of the suburban housing market. While dachas were a reserve of affordable housing during the recession of the 1990s, they served as a stock of building plots during the construction boom of the mid 2000s. In the Tallinn Metropolitan Area, former second homes are even more important than new post-1991 residential areas in terms of giving access to detached houses to the metropolitan population.

The study analyzes the changes in emigration from Estonia in order to shed more light on East-West migration, contributing to the main debate on "brain drain" by focusing on educational differences in emigration. We use anonymous individual level data for all emigrants from the register-based Estonian Emigration Database compiled by Statistics Estonia for the period 2000-2008. The analysis shows that there has been no significant brain drain from Estonia as the new EU member state during this period. Moreover, we find evidence of a spreading of the emigration norm into a wider range of population groups, including the less educated, since Estonia joined the European Union in 2004.