Reinventing Urban Identities in Kazan

Abstract

The paper aims to consider how, since the early 1990s, the city space of Kazan is shaped by different social actors. This paper assumes that a key influence on the process of social production of space in Kazan was the procedure of gaining autonomy after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the lo­cal variant of economic transformation into the global market system. From the beginning of the post-socialist transition, elites’ strategies were related to the politics of memory and the ideas of mul­ticulturalism and federalism. Consequently, Kazan underwent the process of reinventing of urban identity, and indigenization (by Hughes [2007] it was called Tatarazing) of city space. In the capital of Tatarstan the financialization of city space, accumulation through expropriation, and develop­ment by megaevents can be observed. Strategies of development enforced by elites are contested by city inhabitants and grassroots initiatives concentrated around the protection of architectural heritage. Centralized and hierarchical power in Tatarstan makes the grassroots initiatives’ demands possible by a collaboration with local elites.