Cities reflect in tangible ways the values of the societies of which they are a part. Discuss this statement in relation to cities in the Russian Federation since 1991.

University Degree Architecture, Building and Planning

Tutorial 2 – Dr. Pallot St John’s – Chris Britton

The urban landscape is essentially a man-made product, its development results from the ideas, preconceptions and prejudices of the people that design its physical structures, and it is then modified and reproduced by the people that live within its confines. In this way the city must reflect the values and cultures of the people that make up the urban area as a physical entity. Its production and reproduction in space must be regarded as a dialectic in that the urban structure influences and is also influenced by the actions of the people living within the city. The socialist and capitalist cities differ in their structure because of differing interpretations of this dialectic. Whilst capitalism stresses the importance of free markets and therefore the significance of the actions and values of people in determining urban structure; socialism involves the imposition of an ideology on a society. In this way the form of the city is seen as a way of initially imposing and subsequently reproducing new socialist principles on society.

The revolutions of 1917 brought to power in Russia a party that based its principles on the ideas of Karl Marx, as interpreted by Lenin. The avowed aim of the new regime was ultimately to create a communist society from which all traces of the previous capitalist economic system had been eradicated. This new, unprecedented society would enjoy totally different, just egalitarian relationships between its members and these would be reflected in their living and working environments. The society of the Soviet Union after 1917, required a living environment for work, residence and leisure. From the start, this living environment was seen by nearly everyone as an urban one. This is hardly surprising in view of the pre-eminence of the urban industrial proletariat, both in Marxist theory and in the actual events of the Russian Revolution. The prime production task of society became the making of the material goods needed for a satisfying quality of life. The centre of production and the place where full cultural satisfaction could be provided was the city. The city was however, in itself an expression of social organisation and relationships and if, therefore, there was to be a society founded on new principles, inevitably a new urban area would be required, one moulded by and expressing those socialist principles.

Under capitalism urban structure is a mirror of class, as well as economic and social interests in which the urban landscape is a ‘mosaic of financial and cultural interests’, the outcome of investment decisions (Bartelt et al, 1987). As in all capitalist societies money forms the basis of social, economic, cultural and political life. In relation to space, ‘money is a mediator of commodity exchange which radically transforms and fixes the importance of space in social life and defines the limits and imposes necessities upon the shape and form of urban life. Many models have been forwarded to represent the classic capitalist city, it has been realised however, that as differentiation is an integral part of the capitalist system, generalisations such as those made by Hoyt and Burgess cannot be applied to cities across the developed world. The processes present within capitalist cities are however very important, widely applicable and particularly relevant to the transition from the socialist urban landscape to the capitalist city that is occurring in post soviet Russia.

In order to be able to discuss the ways in which capitalism have changed the values of society, and how this is now being represented in the post-soviet urban landscape we must first identify the characteristics of the socialist soviet city. The Soviet city, as a physical entity, was perceived by the Soviet government as the perfect medium through which socialist ideology could be projected onto the Russian people. It came to epitomise the three principles of state socialism:

Firstly the state monopoly ownership of the means of production and most of the means of collective consumption as well, together with the substitution of market led distribution of investment, incomes and consumption goods and services with centralised planning.
The second principle was the political domination of the communist party, acting through a state apparatus which sought to control and order every aspect of social, economic and political life – this being incredibly important with respect to the urban landscape.
And finally the development of a distinctive class structure or socialist rank order, with the elimination of the bourgeoisie as a distinctive social category. The ideal result being the creation of a modestly differentiated broad ‘middle mass’ of the population, a politico-military, industrial and intellectual elite, and an equally limited stratum or ‘underclass’ of those who were excluded from the mainstream of society.

Although the communist party found it difficult to impose through architecture the ideas of socialism in cities with a pre-soviet legacy, ‘the city of socialist man’ (French 1995) was a clearly identifiable entity within the Soviet landscape and an ideal that many Soviet urban planners designed towards. The principle concept of the socialist city concept is the dominance of the city centre. Its special significance is outlined in a Russian report on the principles of urban development:

The centre is the heart of the city, it is the political centre for its citizens. The most important political, administrative ...

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The centre is the heart of the city, it is the political centre for its citizens. The most important political, administrative and cultural establishments are in the city centre. On the central squares, political demonstrations, parades and festivals on public holidays take place. The city centre with squares, main avenues and voluptuous buildings determines the architectural silhouette of the city.

The fact that such principles were determined by the government is a clear sign of the centralism to which urban development in the USSR was subordinated. The homogeneous construction of the centres therefore portrayed the new economic and political system. The artistic urban design concepts that were possible in a system unhampered by capitalists’ sectional interests, placed the largest, most beautiful buildings in the city centre to signify the ‘size and dimension of socialism’s victory’ in the USSR. Instead of single, privately owned buildings there would be blocks of socially owned establishments, designed according to a single concept, which represented the collective spirit of the socialist community, in contrast to the contradictory and fragmented capitalist community. The ornate buildings aimed to encourage the inhabitants to identify with their city and with socialism. The streets were supposed to belong to the ‘people’. Boulevards and central squares, the tools of the absolutist city builder, were constructed for parades and demonstrations

Urban development under socialism reconstructed the city from the standard capitalist model in two respects: first, as discussed above, the city centre was interspersed with representative ‘socialist’ buildings and parade squares; second, the distribution of housing was totally different. The trend in capitalist cities, by which changing land-use patterns led to a constant decrease of inhabitants in the central city, did not occur in socialist cities, where neither land prices nor the inhabitant’s purchasing power for housing were relevant. As there was no competition from an expanding service sector, new housing could be built wherever it was deemed necessary. Although much remained in the city centre most was constructed as large tenement housing blocks on the periphery of the city in which ‘the socialist way of life’ could find its expression.

Figure 1: Typical Soviet housing found on the periphery of Moscow

The allocation of housing in the Soviet Union was used as a tool in the attempted destruction of the bourgeoisie and formation of the socialist class structure identified in the three principles of state socialist shown above. Social segregation based on monetary terms in residential areas was considered as an expression of a capitalist class society, and therefore the removal of class differences in residential areas was seen as an essential, if not deciding factor in the socialist structure of cities (Werner, 1981). As a result, the bulk of the population of cities were allocated flats and apartments with very similar living conditions, and were on the whole un-segregated in socio-spatial terms. The only anomalies being the fringe groups at the lower end of the social hierarchy who were ‘dumped’ in older buildings, and the upper class, the nomenclatura and the intelligentsia who experienced privileged living conditions. Essentially, housing within Soviet cities came to be regarded as homogenous, high-rise blocks and neighbourhood units came to characterise Soviet Urban development. Ironically about this time the western world was beginning to question the social desirability of these types of development.

The standardisation, which was seen as a goal of the socialist city, had left an enduring stamp on housing and the city-scape in the USSR. Soviet central planners had transformed older cities and built new ones to represent and reproduce the ideology of socialism. Some geographers such as Gyorgi Enyedi argued that the Soviet city should be seen as essentially a lagging version of the ‘western’ variant in more advanced capitalist countries. I would argue however, that as shown above, the socialist city had a fundamentally different urban landscape that reflected, in a tangible way, the different ideas, values and political structures of the society that created it. In this way it is therefore understandable that since the break up of the Soviet Union in 1991, the transformation of socio-economic life that has resulted from the transition to capitalism from communism has manifested itself first of all in the cities.

The current transitional processes involve fundamental re-evaluation of the territorial economy – both cities and regions – with respect to the location, functioning and reorganisation of productive activity (Hamilton, 1995). The transition has marked the trend towards the ‘commodification’ of places, which are being exposed not only to economic, but also social, cultural and ecological re-evaluation. Market forces under capitalism now check the efficiency and suitability of the former functional inter-relations, divisions of urban labour and the structure of urban development formed under socialism. In this way, capitalism is beginning to reform the urban landscape of Russian cities to represent the new values and ideals of the societies that create them.

The transformation of the spatial organisation of cities since the collapse of communism can be attributed to three main processes:

the spontaneous development of private business and the increase in the number of small or medium enterprises.
the diminishing role of the state both as a regulator of socio-political life and owner of economic enterprises.
the development of urban government, whose purposes differ from those of previous oblast and state authorities.

(Kostinskiy, 1998)

The emergence of the market economy in Russia has given an obvious impetus to the development of both the commercial and housing sectors of the urban economy. Changes in the nature of the property market have resulted in a substantial increase in the number of new entrepreneurial agents whose activities have contributed to the apparent transformation of the spatial pattern of socio-economic life. These changes, most obvious in the central part of cities, are connected particularly to the structure of retail trade and the development of conspicuous consumption. During the Soviet era the overwhelming majority of Russian cities, whilst traditionally overburdened by industry, were also suffering from a serious shortage of services, retail trade outlets and infrastructure for entrepreneurial activity. Recent patterns of change in societal needs and progress along the path to a market economy have seen the reallocation of central city streets to the highly visible retail trade. Low order shops selling mundane goods have been quickly superseded in the city centres, where competition for space has been intense, by ‘up-market’ shops, outlets that simply weren’t present in the socialist era. They cater for the consumer culture that is now burgeoning in capitalist Russia where material ‘wants’ are becoming evermore a part of everyday life. The photograph shown below of the GUM shopping mall in Moscow is the perfect example of the

Westernisation of the new, highly visible retail areas of Russian cities. The new found obsession with consumer goods and the resulting prevalence of advertising and brand names in Russia is giving the central urban landscape a very different feel, and in this way it represents the new capitalist values of the urban population.

New office developments have also begun to characterise the centres of the bigger cities. Large corporations have had to develop global corporate images to compete in the capitalist economy. The offices and premises of enterprises are seen to reflect the state and ambitions of the firms that reside within them and as a result CBDs filled with modern skyscrapers have begun to develop, as shown in figure 3 below.

Figure 3 – Construction of new offices within the developing CBD of Moscow.

In addition to altering the visual urban landscape of Russian cities, these new developments have also changed the city’s demographic structure. The elderly and low-income households, traditional more prominent in the city centre, have been displaced to more peripheral areas. In fact changes within the housing market have caused a number of changes in both the socio-economic structure and visual landscape of the Russian city. Suburbanisation, a process common in the advanced capitalist countries, did not transpire in socialist cities during the Soviet era and as a result they were generally more compact and more densely populated. Under capitalism there has begun a gradual rehousing of inhabitants from the nucleus of an agglomeration to its suburban zone. The 25% increase in the construction of single or two storey dwellings within the suburban area signifies the increasing importance of the motorcar on the urban landscape and a rejection of the homogenous Soviet apartment for western style differentiation. The vast majority of the population do however still live in the high rise blocks that were built during the Soviet period, but due to the introduction of a residential housing market we are now beginning to observe a slight increase in the socio-economic segregation within the urban structure, although not on the scale that might have been expected from the complete introduction of market forces. The structures that have formed over the decades of socialism appear resistant to widespread change, because no one wants to move to an area where they know nobody (Kostinskiy, 1998).

Although the residential housing market has been privatised under capitalism, there is still no land market within the Russian Federation. The absence of a land market has meant the absence of an effective mechanism for transition from less economic to more efficient means of land use. The distributive mechanism of allocating building sites and the logic of socialist city building still predominates in the modern Russian city. This completely ignores the key mechanism of urban land use in the market economy – demand (Kaganova and Kathanova, 1994). In this way, the development of cities that has occurred since the fall of communism, transforming the urban landscape reflects more the ideas of the city’s mayor than the changing values of society. For example much of the new development in Moscow has been designed in a modernist style, reflecting the ideas of Uri Luzhkov (the mayor of Moscow) on the way a city should look. Although state control has diminished in the post-socialist city autonomous urban governments still hold a great deal of power. Indeed such is this power that some academics have described urban governments in post-socialist Russia as resembling a ‘fig leaf parliamentarism’.

The effects of powerful urban governments can readily be observed in the changing cultural landscapes of Russian cities which have been forcibly altered to signify the transition from communism to capitalism. During the socialist era, cultural architecture was used as propaganda to signify the dominance of communism over capitalism and instil a sense of the power of the central state. Streets and housing developments were named after revolutionary heroes, and there was a strong emphasis on monumental architecture. In post-socialist Russia old symbols of the communist era have often been replaced, for example all the street names in Moscow have been reverted to their original names and new monuments dedicated to pre-Soviet Russian heroes such as Peter the Great have been erected to impose, reproduce and eventually reflect the new ideology of capitalist Russia.

It must be remembered however, that much of the changes in the post-Soviet urban landscape that I have identified above are not applicable to all cities within Russia. The extent of change has been very much dependent on the amount exposure each city has received to western ideas, and more importantly how much investment has been available for the redevelopment of the urban regions in a country dogged by a lack of money. There have undoubtedly been winner and loser regions, with most redevelopment being concentrated in Moscow. A total of 86% (1997) of all foreign investment flows into Moscow and 80% of the country’s financial capital is based there. In the post socialist era Moscow has really pulled away from the other Russian cities and now just as it was the ‘show city’ for Soviet communism it is set to become the ‘show city’ for Russian capitalism.

In the socialist economy the non-economic factors of production – political, ideological, symbolic, social, military, technical – had enormous, if not over-riding importance. Their purpose was to demonstrate the superiority of communism over capitalism. This favoured totality and ‘gigantism’ in the organisation of space and physical planning, as well as emphasising the significance of symbolic meaning, something in which the city, by definition, played a particularly important role. Planning was based on a set of centrally defined rigid, normative understandings that led to the creation of a typical socialist Soviet city. The distinction of the socialism from capitalism manifested itself at the local level, that is at the level of the city or urban agglomeration. The specificity of cities in the Soviet USSR was displayed not on a macro – and not even on a meso-scale, but at the micro-level, notably in peculiarities of intra-urban structure, in the character of their urban centres, suburban zones, housing formations and cultural landscapes (Musil, 1993). The collapse of the communist regime in 1991 and introduction of the capitalist mode of production has initiated a transformation in the territorial organisation of Russian cities. The new urban landscapes that are being sculptured now represent the ideals and values of urban populations driven by competition and the profit motive. The more adaptable elements of the built environment, those capable of bringing quick economic returns have been the first to undergo change under the ‘marketisation’ and commodification of the city. These elements, often readily visible, have substantially modified cityscapes. It is important to remember however, that even more than a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia remains firmly in transition. Cities essentially represent a palimpsest of new capitalist icons imposed on a Soviet urban landscape base as so poignantly illustrated in this photograph of a Communist revolutionary hero in front of an example of typically western advertising. Cities differ the world over not because of differences in construction materials but because they are a result of human ecology. Differences in history, class structure, ethnicity and most importantly the mode of production of a society all come to bear on the structure of their cities. ‘the cities of capitalism and socialism both shape and are shaped by their respective forms of economic organisation, class formation and political structures’ (Andrusz, Harlow & Szelenyi, 1996), and the Russian Federation is no exception, a highly visible post-socialist city is slowly being created by the capitalist mode of production.

Bibliography

Ed G Andrusz, M Harlow and I Szelenyi (1996), Cities after socialism.

R A French (1995) Plans, Pragmatism and People. The legacy of Soviet planning for today’s cities.

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