This book provides a comparative analysis of shrinking cities in a broad range of postsocialist countries within the so-called Global East, a liminal space between North and South. While shrinking ...cities have received increased scholarly attention in the past decades, theoretical, and empirical research has remained predominantly centered on the Global North. This volume brings to the fore a range of new perspectives on urban shrinkage, identifying commonalities, differences, and policy experiences across a very diverse and vivid region with its various legacies and contemporary controversial developments. With chapters written by leading experts in the field, insider views assist in decolonizing urban theory. Specifically, the book includes chapters on shrinking cities in China, Russia, and postsocialist Europe, presenting comparative discussions within countries and crossnational cases on theoretical and policy implications. The book will be of interest to students and scholars researching urban studies, urban geography, urban planning, urban politics and policy, urban sociology, and urban development.
Shrinking cities – places which need to ‘narrow down’ the too spacious settings – pose challenges to the mainstream urban planning which naturalizes growth and direct approaches advocating it. While ...shrinking cities are located worldwide, responses to the phenomenon are place-specific depending on the knowledge and resources of decision-makers, as well as the discourses of the desired spatial development. In this sense, it is still not precisely clear why and how urban planning changes under conditions of shrinkage. Since the beginning of the 1990s, many Russian cities began to lose population. Excluding the oil and gas provinces, the Russian Arctic has become a ‘showcase’ of the country’s population exodus. Our contribution is based on empirical evidence from Vorkuta (Komi Republic, Russia) an Arctic city with around 54 thousand people which is among the fastest shrinking cities of the country. Due to the simultaneous need for improving housing conditions, dealing with negative physical effects of shrinkage, and high maintenance costs of housing and infrastructure the local stakeholders had to come up with a new approach toward planning – the so-called ‘controlled shrinkage’ that helped reduce sprawl and fragmentation.
Shrinkage since the collapse of state socialism has been evident in many Russian cities, especially in small and medium-sized (SMS) ones. The Russian state, de jure, has been promoting the idea of ...self-governance; thereby, urban municipalities ought to develop and adopt own planning decisions to cope with various challenges, including those related to depopulation. The current research focuses on planning responses to urban shrinkage. It aims at understanding how the phenomenon is conceptualized in the planning documents of Russian SMS cities and what solutions are proposed to cope with it in the conditions inherited from the Soviet times housing and infrastructural deficit. The empirical evidence for the analysis is drawn from over 70 SMS cities located in Central and Southern Russia. Results state that despite obvious and persisting urban shrinkage, most of the reviewed documents ignore or underestimate the phenomenon. Instead of suggesting flexible solutions, which would help overcome the shortage of urban infrastructure not aggravating shrinkages' effects in the cityscape, long-term spatial plans are being developed with hope for future growth proposing measures that contribute to the intensification of urban sprawl and fragmentation.
Commuting to work has become a widespread practice over the last several decades. Some relatively strong employment issues in rural Russian municipalities, as well as a significant wage gap between ...them and the major cities, fosters daily commuting as well as commuting with long periods of time spent at employment locations, known in Russia as otkhodnichestvo. Based on official statistical data and our own surveys conducted in Tula and Kostroma regions, we analysed the spatial differentiations between the share of commuters in the employed population of rural municipalities, as well as the variations in individual socio-economic characteristics between rural commuters and non-commuters, in general, and between the commuters themselves. Our analysis of the latter characteristics suggests that there is in fact more difference between the rural commuters and non-commuters in Russia than between daily commuters and those engaged in otkhodnichestvo, indicating similar motives and, perhaps, even personalities of commuters. Giving the identified differences, commuting on a larger scale does not seem to be a universal tool to cope with employment issues, as some population groups are more likely to engage in it than others.
The collapse of state socialism and the introduction of market relationships in Central and Eastern Europe resulted in profound changes of urban development. Evidence from Central and Eastern Europe ...indicates that the development of a strong housing market and growing material inequalities contribute to the socio-economic polarization of city districts and residential segregation. Based on empirical data, we analyze spatial variation of migrants' first residential choices within Moscow, i.e. intensity of in-migration to a specific district. We test the theory-driven hypotheses about the association between residential choices and housing prices. Our results show that there are some areas that attract migrants of specific socio-economic status. However, housing prices do not explain a substantial share of variance in the intensities of in-migration, at least at the level of city districts; quite a strong association is only evident for foreign migrants. Thus, we find limited evidence of the Moscow' socio-spatial structure polarization due to the residential choices of migrants.
•Internal migration accounts for more than 90% of in-migration to Moscow.•Internal migrants' residential patterns are more heterogeneous than immigrants.•Immigrants from neighboring countries mostly settle in peripheral districts.•Immigrants from remote countries settle in prestigious central districts.•Housing prices explain a limited variation of migrants' residential choices.
Nowadays small cities often lose population. In countries which are forerunners of the demographic transition, depopulation is mainly driven by out‐migration of youth. Through a case study of ...students from small Russian cities, this paper explores the nature of the association between local identity (LI) and migration intentions. The study suggests that young people with a stronger LI are on average more prone to return to their native cities after graduation. This ‘traditional’ relationship may be related to the difficulties in maintaining strong ties to a place of personal significance when not residing there in the Russian context. However, overall, youth tend towards a negative association with their cities and LI is formed as an opposition: the denial of place validity. Therefore, both way associations are possible. While a strong LI may influence the intention to migrate, it may also develop as an adaptation mechanism for those forced to return.
This article brings attention to the diversity of urban conditions, actors, agency, and development paths in contrast to the imperatives of urban entrepreneurialism and competitiveness. Rather than ...presupposing the critical role of exogenous sources of growth, the aim of the current paper is in exploring empirically the role of local agency in achieving continuity or change through the lens of urban renewal. The data is drawn from three case studies of small, company towns (monogorods) in Russia. The paper concludes that in small towns local actors and endogenous resources play a strong role in achieving positive change. For Russian monogorods there is a tendency to 'merge' different types of agency into an all-embracing local-based leadership which despite the hierarchical power relations allows for certain decision-making autonomy from the central government. The study indicates the need to better account for diverse forms of human agency in various fields of urban development. While conventional approaches tend to prioritize formal hierarchies and derive agency from static positions of authority and economic power, we demonstrate that actors may assume different roles that do not neatly reflect their positions in a fixed and pre-defined manner or narrowly determined economic interests.
Abstract Questions of responsibility for future‐making often arise in localities where the withdrawal of capital and state seem to leave tangible voids and a sense of loss. Over the past decade, ...academic discourse has furthered discussions on the role of civic engagement, local initiatives and their agency under conditions of urban shrinkage. However, scholars (including ourselves) are confronted with their own normative assumptions and aspirations when conceptualizing local initiatives in shrinking cities. Through reviewing the literature on this phenomenon, we identified three main epistemological pitfalls that emerge from the legacies of planning discipline, current neoliberal developments and scholars’ own biases. By drawing from our fieldwork experiences, we conclude that local initiatives should be viewed in the plurality of their essences as extremely variegated in form and motivation. We therefore assert the need to disentangle research on local initiatives in shrinking cities from normative aspirations to avoid neoliberal responsibilization, and instead pay attention to the nuances of their aims and practices, achievements and constraints.
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