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The Russian Urban System: Evolution Engaged with Transition

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International and Transnational Perspectives on Urban Systems

Part of the book series: Advances in Geographical and Environmental Sciences ((AGES))

Abstract

Russian urbanization has been a fascinating process shaped by a unique set of geographical, economic, and political constraints. The settlement pattern and the speed at which urban hierarchies have changed hold the mark of Soviet policies but also that of a gigantic territory endowed with numerous resources. Nowhere in the world had such a rapid industrialization and urban growth been met in the mid-twentieth century. However, since the 1990s, the transition to capitalism and a significant demographic shrinkage once again put Russian cities in a position of unprecedented evolution. In this chapter, we use two databases and a generic set of analytic tools to describe and model this urban evolution and analyze the impact of the transition on Russian cities. We do so quantitatively by looking at factors of growth and shrinkage before and after 1991 and qualitatively by looking at the specific features of cities in the post-Soviet world. We discuss the challenges that Russian cities face with respect to sustainability in the years to come and conclude with a discussion of multiscale governance.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    DARIUS Database: Demography of Agglomerations in the perimeter of Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union. Available online: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1108081

  2. 2.

    Comparable only with the recent Chinese rates of urbanization.

  3. 3.

    Or 70.5% of Russian agglomerations between 1989 and 2010 (Cottineau 2014a).

  4. 4.

    The indicator of population plays the role of a summary for many other urban attributes, such as jobs, abilities to “catch” innovation, etc. (Pumain 2006).

  5. 5.

    For the sake of ease of notation and interpretation, we use the absolute value of the slope.

  6. 6.

    Technically, before and after 1989, the date of the closest census to 1991.

  7. 7.

    That is, growing at an annual rate exceeding 2% (doubling their population in less than 35 years).

  8. 8.

    408,000 people lived there in 2010, i.e., 73,000 less than 21 years earlier.

  9. 9.

    The width of horizontal lines represents the number of cities in each category of demographic dynamics at a given year, while oblique lines represent the effective of cities transitioning from one category to another between two dates.

  10. 10.

    http://www.gks.ru/wps/wcm/connect/rosstat_main/rosstat/ru/statistics/population/

  11. 11.

    The life expectancy even felt to 57 years in 1994, at the peak of transition crisis.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis CASA, University College London, London, Great Britain

    Clémentine Cottineau

  2. Leibniz-Institut für Länderkunde, Leipzig, Germany

    Irina Frost

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  1. Clémentine Cottineau
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  2. Irina Frost
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Correspondence to Clémentine Cottineau .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Geography and Sustainability, University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland

    Celine Rozenblat

  2. University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, UMR CNRS 8504 Géographie-cités, Paris, France

    Denise Pumain

  3. Regional Office of UN-Habitat for Latin America and the Caribbean, United Nations Habitat, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

    Elkin Velasquez

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Cottineau, C., Frost, I. (2018). The Russian Urban System: Evolution Engaged with Transition. In: Rozenblat, C., Pumain, D., Velasquez, E. (eds) International and Transnational Perspectives on Urban Systems. Advances in Geographical and Environmental Sciences. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7799-9_12

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