Urban policies for a contemporary periphery : Insights from eastern Russia

Interest in improving the quality of urban life is increasing, as demonstrated by the multitude of relevant policies that are proliferating internationally. This thesis asks how cities on the global periphery engage with the ideas that guide current urbanistic practice. The question is addressed by drawing on unique empirical material from the Russian Far East and Siberia; a multimethod research design is applied to three examples of urban policy change associated with three processes of urban renewal that pertain to the quest for internationalization, revitalization, and participatory design. The analysis follows moments of normative change, sketches the actor landscape and the allocation of resources, and captures material outputs. Analyzing and further conceptualizing these, the thesis highlights how adaptation to urbanistic practice has been linked to a recent problematizing of urbanity in the respective national and local policy landscape. Rather than relying on the analytical categorization of the post-Soviet city, this thesis argues that urban policy change can be explained in terms of the pursuit of contemporaneity. It also highlights the conditioning of the mobilization and localization of policies by the spatiotemporal specificities of eastern Russia. Vasileios Kitsos has a background in architecture and urban studies and carries out research in the feld of urban sociology. This book is his doctoral thesis.