The Citizen in Search of Community: Peculiarities of the Organization of the Far Eastern Urban Space (the Case of Khabarovsk)

Abstract

As a rule, the tradition of analysis and description of the Russian city space marginalizes significant parts of this space. Thus, industrial zones, low-rise residential areas, etc. fall outside the concept of ‘city’. The Soviet ‘private sector’ often remains outside the scope of analysis, covering more than half of the city’s territory and a significant part of its population in individual settlements. This discussion in scientific papers has appeared recently, and we want to proceed with it in the space of Far Eastern cities. In this paper, we propose to look at these ‘marginal’ territories and the groups inhabiting them from a fundamentally different perspective, to consider them not as ‘territories of prospective development’, but as already established social space, with its inherent social significances and practices. From the framework of the Khabarovsk city we determine the ratio of ‘normal urban’ (regular urban development) and ‘marginal’ spaces on the basis of two years of observation, three series of in-depth interviews and analysis of statistics, demographic and spatial data, and then combine these two separated parts into a single object - the city, which, as we show in our work, is eminently characterized by both these types of spaces. As the study showed, it is in the ‘invisible’ part of the city that the most stable communities are formed, actively participating in the ‘struggle for the city’, organizing routine resistance to the aspirations of powerful agents to change their space. In areas of regular urban development, on the contrary, communities are increasingly replaced by ‘combinations’, associations regarding the use of common elements of urban infrastructure. At the same time, ‘meeting points’ appear between these parts, uniting the city, giving it a chance to form integrity, or at least coherence. The authors present an analysis of the urban space and urban communities of Khabarovsk in this article.