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Resilience capacity of contemporary Russian Arctic cities: methodological approaches and quantitative assessments
The research question of the paper is how to utilize ecosystem studies to refresh our research of the contemporary Russian Arctic cities, to deepen our understanding of the difference between resilient and sustainable cities, and to create a methodological approach to measure the resilience capacity of the Arctic cities. The paper describes three main stages-directions of the latest study of the Arctic cities: (i) Arctic urbanization as a global phenomenon; (ii) emphasis on the internal structure of the Arctic city; and (iii) analysis and assessment of the viability and sustainability of Arctic cities. The most important lesson of Soviet studies of the Arctic is the need for a holistic view of the ecosystems of the polar regions, overcoming the temptation to reduce to only one, even a powerful, factor, for example, climate change. Following this methodology, the authors propose a comprehensive approach to assessing the viability of a sample of the 29 largest Arctic cities in Russia, including three blocks of nine indicators covering the external location of the city, internal spatial structure, and structural flexibility of the urban system. As the result of aggregation of three blocks of indicators, an integral index of the viability (resilience capacity) of the Arctic cities to external natural and social crises has been proposed. According to the value of this integral index of vitality, modern Russian Arctic cities are colossally different in the strength of their external position, in the degree of diversity of their spatial and economic structure, in the degree of flexibility of the urban system. Old-developed cities of the European North like Arkhangelsk, Severodvinsk and Onega have the best positions. They are followed by the large Soviet port and industrial centre of Murmansk and most of the single-industry cities in the Murmansk Oblast, and then by the monoprofile cities of Yamal-Nenets autonomous okrug and the capital of Nenets autonomous okrug Naryan-Mar. The list is by large, by Arctic standards, single-industry cities of the Asian Arctic—Norilsk, Nadym, Dudinka and the administrative centre of the Chukotka autonomous okrug Anadyr, which all have the worst positions in terms of resilience capacity. The paradox of our approach to assessing the viability of Russia's Arctic cities is that the further an Arctic city is from the classical canons of a Soviet industrial city, the more resilient it is.