Urban Margins, Global Transitions: Everyday Security and Mobility in Four Russian Cities

The project investigates uneven development, insecurity and precarity in urban Russia. It uses mono-industrial cities, established as part of the socialist planning economy and known as monogorodsin Russian, and urban migrant experiences with the post-socialist economy as entry points to address these localised developments as embedded in global transformation. The four cities in focus are the post-industrial metropolis St. Petersburg in west-Russia; the port-town and transportation hub Rostov-on-Don located on Russia’s southwestern border with Ukraine; the mono-industrial city Tolyatti in the southern region Samara; and Zapolyarny, also a mono-industrial city located at the northwest periphery of Russia’s Pechenga-region. The project uses interviews, including traditional interviews and the use of photographs to learn about people’s experiences. With this field work-based approach, the project empirically compares and contrasts experiences with urban margins across the four cities. Conceptualized as socio-spatial expressions of poverty, crime and insecurity, urban margins have an acquired status as deviant space. In the post-socialist city, the urban margin is however a more fluid phenomenon than the more spatially fixed US ghetto, French banlieu, or the slum in cities of the global south that are usually associated with the term urban margin. The post-socialist city is lacking from this global research program. This project aims to study particular urban margins across four Russian cities, to produce new and differentiated insights into urbanisation and urban margins in Russia, and to conceptualise these experiences from the post-socialist city within global comparative research on urban margins. This project argues that urban margins in the post-socialist city form a particular case for comparison of urban margins relevant to the concern with global transformation. 

In this project the post-socialist city is both a lens through which to magnify contextual knowledge of life in the urban margin across four Russian cities, and a telescope into global transitions. For that purpose, the research design is focused on empirical data collection of high quality to generate a solid basis for comparison across cities and to draw on this for conceptual and theoretical development. 

The research design comprises conventional qualitative methods (interviews, observations) in combination with a participatory and non-discursive photo-voice methodology. This combination of methods aims to ensure high quality of data for the cross-city comparison of four Russian cities, and with the use of visual methods to provide insight into less accessible spaces of the everyday. 

Interviews will be conducted with city authorities, representatives of civil society organizations (e.g. NGOs), and other bodies (e.g. real-estate agents) to explore the main security topics and factors that contribute to people’s (in-)security. These interviews complement the pre-field work review of spatial arrangements of each city (city profiling), including a review of regional specificities of urbanisation and socio-economic developments. The bulk of interviews will however be conducted with individuals, carefully selected to ensure that both men and women of different age are included in the sample, and with regard to their experiences on the urban margins. These interviews are important to provide first insights into the living conditions, security challenges and urban practices of informants. Interviews will also be used to identify people willing to participate in the photo-voice project.

Photo-voice aims at transforming a smaller group of informants into research participants who represent their experiences and practices pertaining to everyday security through photographing, and thus without direct influence of the researcher. Photos are not only a representation of the reality, but through the use of the camera lens, the photo-voice participant selects and filters according to aestethic and other valued preferences to represent his or her life words. The participants will, after the photographing, select photos and invite the research team to look at their experiences through their own photographic lens. While presenting the photos, they share the story the picture evokes for them and describe the social and physical spaces they perceive as secure/insecure and the challenges that they associate with it. These experiences are shared through a medium that can compensate for difficulties in verbal articulation. The project team will then discuss the coding and interpretation of the images/data, a process in which the researcher again takes a more active role.

This rigorous design for data collection provides deep, contextual insight on selected Russian cities. The research process will culminate in a comparative exercise that aims to accumulate the empirical results and theorise developments in the post-socialist city's urban margins. In this way, the project avoids treating Russia merely as an exemption to be analysed separately, to situate the cases within global research on urban margins and global transitions.