Book
New Mobilities and Social Changes in Russia’s Arctic Regions
The book provides the first in-depth, multidisciplinary study of reurbanization in Russia's Arctic regions, with a specific focus on new mobility patterns, and the resulting birth of new urban Arctic identities in which newcomers and labor migrants form a rising part. It is an invaluable reference for all those interested in current trends in circumpolar regions, showing how the Arctic is becoming more diverse culturally, but also more integrated into globalized trends in terms of economic development, urban sustainability, and migration.
The so called Russian Asian North is overviewed, comprising the Urals, Siberian, and Far eastern federal districts, and their demographic and political situation. Arctic regions offer a range of political climates , with some relatively open and competitive - in the Russian context of growing authoritarianism - and others opaque and monolithic. The local politics is key to help us move from Moscow-centered Arctic policy to everyday realities on the ground.
The article examines a crucial shift in models of domestication of the Soviet Far North during the Thaw period. The closure of the Gulag system and the social transformations of the 1950s caused changes in the social space of the Soviet North and in the role of expert knowledge in the USSR. By focusing on modernist urban projects for the Soviet Arctic, I analyse how urban specialists during the Thaw attempted to formulate a new conception of the North as a place for ‘ordinary life’ and therefore transform a peripheral region into an ‘average’ Soviet space.
Russia prefers the development of transport corridors that allow to reduce transport costs, the time of delivery of goods from production countries to markets that are thousands of kilometers away, which is beneficial both for the countries of the producers of the Asia-Pacific Region and for Russia. Such a transport corridor is the Northern Sea Route. Further development of this transport corridor, development of its infrastructure is necessary both for mastering the SMP as an internal sea route and for creating a large transport corridor capable of becoming a competitor of transport corridors passing through the Suez Canal. At the same time, how Russia and the EAEU will successfully solve such complex and truly promising infrastructure tasks, will show what place in the modern and future world order Russia and the EAEU are planning to occupy.
Industrialisation and social transformations changed the landscapes of the Soviet Arctic and stimulated discussions about the models of its domestication. Numerous industrial towns in the Soviet Far North in the 1930s were established next to Gulag labour camps. The attempt of technical, social and visual re-conceptualisation of urban space in the Soviet Arctic related to several reforms of the post-Stalin period. This chapter analyses how Leningrad architects since the 1950s used modernist urban projects for the realisation of their professional and personal ambitions trying to create a new conception of a “normal city” in extreme climate. While most were not implemented, their appearance shows the shift of the attitude toward the North in the USSR as well as the controversial changes of experts’ position.
This paper examines recent literature on achieving sustainable cities that incorporate a combined mitigation–adaptation approach towards improved urban resilience as a way of future-proofing. A multidisciplinary approach, which integrates scientific as well as ecopolitical frameworks, is found to benefit this sustainability discourse.
Several approaches to the concept of fatherhood present in Western sociological tradition are analyzed and compared: biological determinism, social constructivism and biosocial theory. The problematics of fatherhood and men’s parental practices is marginalized in modern Russian social research devoted to family and this fact makes the traditional inequality in family relations, when the father’s role is considered secondary compared to that of mother, even stronger. However, in Western critical men’s studies several stages can be outlined: the development of “sex roles” paradigm (biological determinism), the emergence of the hegemonic masculinity concept, inter-disciplinary stage (biosocial theory). According to the approach of biological determinism, the role of a father is that of the patriarch, he continues the family line and serves as a model for his ascendants. Social constructivism looks into man’s functions in the family from the point of view of masculine pressure and establishing hegemony over a woman and children. Biosocial theory aims to unite the biological determinacy of fatherhood with social, cultural and personal context. It is shown that these approaches are directly connected with the level of the society development, marriage and family perceptions, the level of egality of gender order.