The Hybrid Spatialities of Transition:
Capitalism, Legacy and Uneven Urban
Economic Restructuring
Oleg Golubchikov, Anna Badyina and Alla Makhrova
[Paper first received, March 2012; in final form, January 2013]
Abstract
This paper conceptualises post-socialist urban economic geographies through the
notion of hybrid spatialities that emerge from the mutual embeddedness of neoliberalism
and socialist legacies. While the dismantling of state socialism was a massive
moment towards the exacerbation of uneven development, ironically it is the socialist-era
spatial legacy that has become the single major differentiating factor for the
economic status of cities. This superficial overdetermination, however, masks the
root causes of uneven development that must be seen in the logic of capitalism and
its attendant practices which subsume legacy, recode its meaning, and recast the formerly
equalitarian spaces as an uneven spatial order. The authors argue that the
socialist legacy, rather than being an independent carrier of history, has been alienated
from its history to become an infrastructure of neoliberalisation, conducive to
capitalist process. The paper draws specifically on the experiences of Russia,
although its reflections should reverberate much more broadly.
Introduction
When, between 1989 and 1991, state socialism
collapsed in eastern Europe and ‘democratic
capitalism’ was promulgated as
henceforth the only ruling ideology, the
protagonists celebrated the world’s return
to the natural course of history and even
‘the end of history’ altogether (Fukuyama,
1992). Of course, history did not end back
then; rather, a ‘post-socialist transition’ has
burst into its own history—complex,
Oleg Golubchikov is in the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of
Birmingham, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK. Email: o.golubchikov@me.com.
Anna Badyina is in the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, South
Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3QY, UK. Email a.badyina@chch.oxon.org.
Alla Makhrova is in the Department of Geography, Moscow State University, Moscow, Russian
Federation. Email: almah@mail.ru.
Article
51(4) 617–633, March 2014
0042-0980 Print/1360-063X Online
Ó 2013 Urban Studies Journal Limited
DOI: 10.1177/0042098013493022
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problematic and, for that matter, painfully
long for the population that has been subjected
to it. While a few post-socialist countries
(mostly in central Europe) performed
relatively successfully in the 1990s, the vast
majority went through a period of economic
disaster. For their population, the
reforms have been associated with economic
hardship, impoverishment and the
rise of the problems that barely existed
under state socialism—from unemployment
to homelessness. Whilst the following
decade witnessed a more inclusive ‘restorative’
growth, by the end of it, the now-capitalist
eastern Europe has been readily
incorporated into the global financial crisis,
with yet another period of uncertainties and
bumpy GDPs. Yet, a crucial matter is how
these GDPs are produced and controlled:
access to the fruits of economic development
is now much more unequal than in
the socialist past. To start, post-socialist
societies have been deeply divided—with
stagnation, decline and marginalisation paralleling
unparallelled wealth concentration,
economic success and material consumption.
Yet this sense of rising inequalities
(Heyns, 2005; Dunford, 2005) has also been
projected over geography, which has witnessed
uneven development growing simultaneously
at varied scales—from regions to
neighbourhoods.
The understanding of the critical transformations
linked to post-socialist experiences
can offer much to refining the theories
of capitalism and uneven development more
broadly. In this paper, we provide a critique
of interurban disparities which we use as a
window onto the broader relationships,
including those between (evolving) legacy,
geography and power geometries. It is
important to take a more generalised stock
here, as existing literature rarely provides a
coherent critical reading of the complex
politico-economic dynamic underpinning
uneven development under post-socialism.
We particularly problematise the interplay
of the (geo-economic) legacies of state
socialism and the dynamics of neoliberal
capitalism in the production of uneven
development. The socialist legacy remains
an ambivalent concept in post-socialist
urban and regional studies, prone to reductionist
readings around ‘alien’ remnants of
the past and/or deterministic ‘path dependent’
causalities, where, for example, the
evidence of the multiple dependencies of
post-socialist spatial disparities on inherited
economic landscape can ‘explain’ the very
origin of the uneven development. It is easy
to overlook the more fundamental nature of
capitalism, including its systemic propensity
to produce inequalities—no matter what
original spatialities and legacies it colonises.
We contend that, as much as being a
determinant of change, legacy has been
determined itself—or rendered its particular
meaning, value and rhythm—by the
logic of the new regulatory and circulatory
system of (neoliberal) accumulation. We
discuss this mutual embeddedness of the
legacies of socialism and the workings of
neoliberal capitalism that jointly produce
what we define as the hybrid spatialities of
transition—‘strange’ geographies that function
according to the tune of capital but
often conceal their capitalist nature with
socialist-era ‘legacies’, even though the
latter have quintessentially been alienated
from their ideological, institutional and
economic history. We articulate the need to
expose the root causes of uneven development
which lie not simply with legacies,
lock-ins or path dependences, but most
fundamentally with the workings and contradictions
of capitalism per se, including
its historically and contextually specific systems
of power, institutions and division of
labour, as well as its Schumpeterian
impulses for creative destruction—that
colonise, disintegrate and remould the formerly
egalitarian socialist spaces into an
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inequitable spatial order. This also resonates
with Lefebvre’s (1974/1991) claim
that different modes of economic relations
produce their own space—they appropriate
space to their own needs and reconstruct
existing patterns to their own image.
In the next section, we start problematising
the relationships between uneven geographical
development and legacy in the
post-socialist context. This is followed by a
section that builds a different reading of
legacy, as subsumed by capital to become
an inherent part of the capitalist spatiality,
conducive to capitalist expansion; we then
use this reading for articulating the notion
of the hybrid spatialities of transition.
These discussions are then specified with
urban restructuring in Russia. Russia has
the world’s longest history of state socialism,
as well as the world’s largest geography,
making the interplay between history
and geography particularly interesting. We
review the pre-conditions and patterns of
interurban economic disparities and links
between economic legacy, urban restructuring
and the new institutions of spatial
governance.
Problematising the Relationships
between Uneven Development and
Legacy
Uneven geographical development remains
a central concern for political-economic
geographical studies that provides an
important avenue for ontological and epistemological
reflections on spatial and social
relationships under capitalism more generally
(inter alia Lefebvre, 1974/1991; Harvey,
1982, 2006; Smith, 1990; Massey, 1995).
This scholarship has demonstrated that
uneven development, like space itself, is
socially and politically produced; it is to a
large extent a historically specific product
of political choice, of particular economic
and geo-institutional regimes and, more
specifically, is the inherent part of the capitalist
spatiality. As Soja stresses
The production and reproduction of [geographically
uneven development] is necessary
to the origins, development, and survival of
capitalism and demands an interpretation
which moves beyond its incidental expression
. [It] becomes part of the material
framework of capitalism, linked directly to
the labor process, to economic exploitation
and political domination, to the accumulation
process and attendant class struggles, to
the making of concrete capitalist geography
and history (Soja, 1985, pp. 178–179; original
emphasis).
Certainly, capitalism itself evolves, responding
to technological and institutional contexts,
so that the patterns and intensities of
uneven development have varied across time
and space (Pike et al., 2007; Brenner et al.,
2010). Yet, there seems to be a consensus
that under the present politico-economic
regimes of neoliberalism uneven spatial
development has intensified. As Brenner
(2004) argues with a reference to western
Europe, instead of conceiving uneven development
as a barrier to economic or industrial
growth as under the previous welfarist/
Keynesian regime, neoliberalism takes geographical
inequalities as the basis for growth,
privileging certain areas as the motors of
economic development and reconcentrating
resources in ‘strategic areas’. Redistributive
regional policies and national spatial planning
have been replaced by area-specific policies
and targeted investments. Brenner
suggests that this politics is part of a reterritorialisation
of state institutions from the allnational
redistributive modalities towards
the urban-centric neoliberal competitiveness.
Neoliberalism is also commonly
acknowledged as the dominant ideology
driving post-socialism (Pickles and Smith,
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1998; Stenning et al., 2010; Birch and
Mykhnenko, 2010). However, the critical
insights into uneven geographical development
as established in the context of
Western geography since the 1970s are rare
in the eastern European urban and regional
scholarship (see Timar, 2007). The latter, as
Grubbauer (2012) observes, favours
descriptive and eclectic accounts, which,
one can further argue, accedes to the elitistneoliberal
imaginaries of transition.
Through describing rather than deconstructing
and questioning the hegemonic
project of post-socialism, this literature
normalises the latter (for recent literature
reviews, also see Gentile et al., 2012; Sykora
and Bouzarovski, 2012). This is particularly
true of the economic analyses of uneven
spatial development that have rested upon
positivist quantifications or mapping of
these rather than probing into their root
causes. Thus, disparities in the economic
performance of regions and cities are typically
explained by the inherited conditions
(such as agglomeration effect, location, economic
specialisation or even climatic conditions)
as well as by differing local policies
(for example, Shorrocks and Wan, 2005;
Kanbur and Venables, 2007; Mykhnenko
and Turok, 2008; see Gluschenko, 2011, for
a specific literature review on Russia’s
regional inequalities). While, as we discuss
later, these are important mediating factors
of spatial differentiation, it is insufficient to
correlate spatial disparities with other factors
of geographical differentiation—as if
the latter stood at the root cause of the very
occurrence of the former. There needs to be
a more explicit critical grounding of
uneven economic development in the politico-economic
conditions, especially in the
endogenous processes of contextually specific
yet systemically uneven and crisisprone
capitalist accumulation and the
exploitative effects of neoliberal institutional
systems that underpin the post-socialist
capitalisms. At best, however, there are
references to ‘exogenous’ triggers, including
globalisation, which is wrapped in various
stylised facts, such as trade openness, FDI or
EU and NATO accession (for example,
Hamilton et al., 2005) and which, like ‘transition’
itself, has become more a legitimising
‘necessity’ of inequalities than an anchor of
critical assessment.
The ineffective critique of capitalist spatial
processes also prevents the post-socialist
scholarship from an effective critique of the
inherited conditions and their own stake in
uneven regional development, although
legacy remains the key to the debates over
continuity vs change (Lane, 2002;
Grubbauer, 2012). Particularly controversial
is a static understanding of legacy, seen as
permanently embedded in the socialist past
but emanating lasting effects conceived as
‘path dependence’. The latter, however, is a
problematic concept, as discussed by Martin
and Sunley (2006). Although ‘path dependence’
has allowed heterodox theories to
bring important insights into the postsocialist
spatial evolutionary processes (for
example, Grabher and Stark, 1998), it is frequently
misconstrued, along with the notion
of legacy itself, by various reductionist
accounts stretching to historical and environmental
determinism (Hedlund, 2005;
Hill and Gaddy, 2003). Yet, irrespective of
the differences in ontological positions, the
discourses of legacies and path dependency
are circumscribed by the isomorphic imaginaries
of pasts and paths which are inadequate
to capture the deeper and radical
metamorphoses with regard to the very
essence of ‘legacy’. Thus, the socialist legacy
is imagined as a fixed point of departure,
which gradually fades from view as the journey
into transition continues, so that the
varied speed with which its presences are
fading constitutes the very essence of transitional
dynamics—which are, consequently,
faster for ‘institutional transformations’,
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slower for ‘social transformations’ and yet
slower for ‘urban transformations’ (Sykora
and Bouzarovski, 2012). In these accounts,
the inherited institutional and material
landscape is seen as ‘the past in present’,
alien to the new regime and, although tolerated
of necessity, being progressively eradicated
(rather than seen as fluid and
conducive to the very capitalist process),
while uneven development emerges as the
inability of some places to get rid of their
socialist legacies (rather than as the appropriation
of these places from inside by the
very capitalist process and the alienation of
their ‘socialist legacy’ from its socialist self).
In our view, these ontologies of legacies
as independent ‘carriers of history’
(MacKinnon et al., 2009) alien to capitalism
and yet enduring in their distorting
effects, including their impacts on spatial
inequality, fail to account for the ontological
inseparability and co-evolution of the
social, the spatial and the temporal in capitalist
processes—what Soja (1996) calls the
trialectics of spatiality, historicality and
sociality. Instead, in relation to, for example,
urban change, the temporality is
reduced to the binary co-existence of legacy
vs novelty, while spatiality is reduced to the
material appearances of physical space
(including the built environment) and is
divorced from its multifaceted sociality—
ideologies, politics, meaning, everyday life
and all else that Lefebvre (1974/1991)
famously compressed in this triad of perceived,
conceived and lived spaces. A critical
geographical approach demands a more
integrative reading of the evolution of spatial
relations, which would take more
boldly capitalism as a point of reference
alongside the processes of the subsumption
by capitalism of the post-socialist spaces
that recently were beyond its key pasture.
According to Massey (1995), local economies
need to be seen as a historical product
of the combination and interaction of
successive rounds of accumulation,
unevenly unfolding across the economic
landscape, in the process of a continuous
interplay, co- and re-constitutions of the
accumulated results of the inherited spatial
structures and the new cycles of economic
development. This local process is, further,
always imbued with the requirements of
the current capitalist system and embedded
in the pre-eminence of national politics
(see MacKinnon et al., 2009; Pike et al.,
2010). It is then a crucial epistemological
question how to reflect on the political
economy of the co-evolutionary ‘combination
and interactions’ of socialist and postsocialist
rounds of accumulation in the
production of the uneven spatiality of transition
and at the same time to avoid the
reductionist binary of legacy vs novelty or
its derivatives (for example, homopolis vs
heteropolis of Gentile et al., 2012). We
attend to this in the next section.
The Subsumption of Legacy and the
Hybrid Spatialities of Transition
It may be pertinent to start building a new
narrative of the (socio-temporal-spatial)
process of post-socialist uneven development
by referring to Clark and Tracey’s
(2004) institutional critique that distinguishes
two aspects of path dependence:
inheritance and endowment. They define
an endowment as an inheritance that is
invested—i.e. capitalised as a flow of
income. A given inheritance may (or may
not) be translated into varied endowments,
subject to how the inheritance is perceived,
conceived and mobilised by given economic
agents as a response to the exigencies
of the present. Thus, the otherwise
similar inherited conditions may represent
dissimilar opportunities for actors happening
to be in different politico-economic
environments or pursuing different
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strategies or objectives. It is in the dialogue
with its environments that economic
agency takes particular routes in converting
an inheritance into an endowment. In
other words, the latter is a translation of
the processes or materialities originated in
the past into the contextually specific
unfoldings of the present. This understanding
may be extended to the reading of the
evolution of post-socialist spatialities. Their
socialist-era legacies can be seen in a constant
process of acquiring new meanings,
both influencing and being influenced by
on-going economic and social practices
and decision-making. In other words, spatial
legacy (or, more precisely, the historicality
of social spatiality) is not absolute or
fixed; it is always relative and interpretive,
in a continuous process of change—
dialectically a hybrid product of the old
and new processes, but never simply reducible
to either of them or even their sum.
Actually, this sense of hybridity is fruitful
for a critique of the spatiality of post-socialism
more directly. Hybridity is a much
debated concept in fields such as cultural
studies and post-colonialism, developing
from various traditions, from Bakhtin to
Bhaba (Papastergiadis, 2005). In geography,
it has allowed transgressing binary constructs
and highlighting a co-constitutive
nature of various processes of geographical
significance (for example, Whatmore, 2002;
Yeung, 2004). As the testimony of its pertinence
for the understanding of this unordinary
context of radical change, the reference
to hybridity is also recurrent in post-socialist
geography. As Golubchikov and Phelps
note, for example
Post-socialist urban societies need to be
viewed as hybrid juxtapositions of social
forms, relationships and trajectories, emerging
from the struggles between their ‘outside’,
their ‘inside’ and their histories
(Golubchikov and Phelps, 2011, p. 429).
Stenning also notes:
Post-socialism . is . partial and hybrid. In
some spaces, the socialist seems to be a stronger
influence, in others practices of Western
capitalism seem to be more influential. In all,
post-socialism is marked by a combination of
multiple social forms, constructed at varied
scales of time and space . In short, postsocialism
cannot be reduced to neoliberal economic
restructuring, nor just to the legacies of
socialism (or pre-socialism), nor indeed to
the passage of ‘transition’. It is all of these
(Stenning, 2005, p. 124).
However, this reading of hybridity may still
bring in the imaginaries of a parallel co-existence
of socialist and capitalist ‘ingredients’,
which are bundled together to give a different
‘taste’ to each space—somewhere more
‘socialist’, somewhere more ‘Western’. In
our view, post-socialism should be imagined
as a more radical societal transformation,
where socialist ‘ingredients’ are no longer
‘socialist’ and where hybridity arises from
the dialectical and ambivalent yet essentially
patterned and hierarchical relationships
between the neoliberalised legacies of socialism
and the workings of capitalism. Postsocialist
capitalism is certainly not creatio ex
nihilo—it develops from within the existing
structures and relationships, but it introduces
the fundamental and all-encompassing
distortions in the very ideology of these
structures and related social and spatial
practices. The latter, while even perhaps
maintaining their ‘socialist-era’ appearances
and functionality, are now fundamentally
subordinated to, and cater for, capitalist
immediacies and are, accordingly, rendered
a rather different ideology, meaning and significance
than in the past.
The nature of this process is not dissimilar
to what Marx in Capital characterised as
the subsumption of the labour process by
capital in the process of primitive
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accumulation in previously non-capitalist
environments—capital not simply appropriates
labour processes, but transforms the
social relations of labour which become
imbued with the nature and requirement of
capital itself and alienated from the means
of production. Similarly, those legacies of
socialism that collide with capitalism are
alienated by capitalism from their past
institutional and ideological attachments
and roots and diffused into the new capitalist
reality. Here, we can see parallels with
Bhabha’s reading, who, with reference to
post-colonial cultural practices, argues that
Hybridity . is the ‘third space’ which displaces
the histories that constitute it, and set up new
structures of authority, new political initiatives,
which are inadequately understood through
received wisdom (Bhabha, 1990, p. 211).
It is, therefore, necessary to acknowledge not
only the endogenous roots in post-socialist
economic processes, like ‘path dependence’
readings do, but also that these roots themselves
are undergoing a process of continuous
‘translation’ into something new and different,
being part of the ‘intertextuality’, where
the new and totalising capitalist processes
work from within them to render them totally
new meanings. Path dependence here is much
of an illusionary familiarity—old ‘paths’ may
still be visible, but the overall landscape has
changed and renders these paths entirely new
co-ordinates, shapes and meanings. This
interpretation is also close to the sociologist
reading of Burawoy and Verdery
We challenge those analyses that account for
the confusions and shortcomings of the transition
process as ‘socialist legacies’ or ‘culture’.
Repeatedly, we find that what may
appear as ‘restorations’ of patterns familiar
from socialism are something quite different:
direct responses to the new market initiatives,
produced by them, rather than remnants of
an older mentality. In other words, we find
that what looks familiar has causes that are
fairly novel (Burawoy and Verdery, 1999, pp.
1–2; original emphasis).
In our view, post-socialist economic geographies
need to be understood through
hybrid spatialities that essentially function
according to the requirement of capital
even though they may conceal their capitalist
ideology and rhythm with their socialistera
roots and resemblances. We believe that
the narrative of hybrid spatialities is better
fit to capture the fundamental politico-economic
changes than ‘path dependence’.
Although we too stress the conditioning
role of ‘legacy’, we understand it not as
alien but rather generative to the capitalist
process itself. Furthermore, it is the logic of
neoliberal capitalism that dictates the pathways
of the reconfiguration of the legacy of
state socialism, rather than the other way
round as imagined by the discourses on
‘path dependent’ post-socialism. Rather
than a barrier to capital or neoliberalisation,
the spatial legacy of state socialism should
be re-imagined as the very infrastructure of
neo-liberalisation, within which neoliberal
capitalism becomes embedded and which it
uses for accumulation.
We now want to specify this on-going
interplay of the history, geography and
institutional landscape and how neoliberalisation
forms uneven spatialities based on
neoliberalised socialist legacies by looking
at urban restructuring in Russia.
The Political Economy of Uneven
Urban Restructuring in Russia
The Patterns of Urban Economic
Restructuring
Certainly, the longest history of state socialism
has left important legacies for Russia’s
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urban geography. During the seven decades
under the Soviet rule, Russia experienced an
urban explosion—the urban population
grew from 17 per cent to 74 per cent between
1917 and 1990. Cities were considered an
essential part of the production of socialist
spatialities, at the forefront of building a
classless society (Davidow, 1976; Bater,
1980; French, 1995). The state was characterised
by a hierarchically ordered space
based on national economic planning and
rigidly controlled and redistributive accumulation.
The national urban systems were
structured into central place systems in
which the centre of each administrative level
provided consumer goods and services to its
lower-order administrative levels, while
remaining itself dependant on the allocation
of resources ‘from above’ (Axenov et al.,
2006). The goal was the elimination of
remaining socioeconomic disparities
between administrative territorial units.
This approach suited well the existing accumulation
and regulatory regime aiming at
achieving high and egalitarian social standards.
A corollary was, however, the contradiction
of the very principle of equalisation
due to often lower standards of living in
smaller towns despite a trend towards mitigating
the differences—the condition that
after the establishment of capitalism has run
out of proportion (see Mellor, 1999).
Since the collapse of socialism, the level
of urbanisation in Russia has changed only
marginally (73.7 per cent according to the
2010 census)—although hiding critical
internal reconcentrations of the population.
While Soviet policy favoured the development
of the resource frontier associated
with new towns in northern and eastern
peripheries, in the post-Soviet period this
process has seen a reversal—an out-migration
to the south-west and a reconcentration
of population in larger cities. While
during the Soviet period almost all urban
places continued to grow, between 1991
and 2011 more than 70 per cent of Russia’s
cities and towns have been shrinking, with
shrinkage being more common for smaller
cities. While 63 per cent of the total number
of urban places have shrunk faster than
Russia’s total rate of depopulation (3.65 per
cent), the proportion is symmetrical—66
per cent, 50 per cent and 32 per cent—for
cities respectively, smaller than 100,000,
between 100,000 and 500,000, and above
500,000. Most remarkably, Moscow has
grown by 30 per cent—from 8.9 to 11.5 million
(Golubchikov and Makhrova, 2013).
The demographic situation reflects the
reformatting of economic geography,
where both the interregional and intraregional
scales have manifested the high
levels of uneven development between
cities (Ioffe et al., 2001). Research has
addressed the factors behind this new geography,
contending that the performance of
cities and regions have been largely determined
by their initial economic, infrastructural
and geographical conditions existing
at the beginning of transition (Hanson and
Bradshaw, 2000; Popov, 2001; Ahrend,
2005; Golubchikov, 2006; Gluschenko,
2011). For example, Zubarevich (2003)
argues that the main determinants of the
adaptation of cities have been their size,
administrative status, location and functional
specialisation, stressing that it is particularly
the inherited functions—economic
and administrative—that contribute most
to emerged economic disparities. This outlook
is generally maintained to this date,
despite rapid economic growth in the 2000s
(Golubchikov and Makhrova, 2013). Thus,
cities that have relatively successfully transformed
their economies have rearticulated
their inherited structures as various adaptation
models: post-industrial (larger cities
and regional capitals), industrial (cities
with export-oriented or certain importsubstituting
economies), gateway (such as
ports, border cities or transport junctions),
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tourist (smaller cities with an attractive
tourist ‘image’—for example, Suzdal,
Myshkin, Velikiy Ustyug), recreational (for
example, Sochi), or a combination of these
models (Vendina, 2006).
Larger cities and administrative capitals
are often contrasted with smaller, especially,
single-industry towns. As in the Soviet era
the majority of economic institutions, communication
infrastructure and human capital
were concentrated in regional centres,
these have been most successful in the
attraction of capital. The introduction of
the direct channels of global/urban interplay
has benefited these cities’ integration into
international capital flows, while they have
become ‘liberated’ from the obligations to
assist their ‘backyard’, resulting in a growing
gap between regional capitals and
their territories (Leksin, 2008). Large cities
have become major markets themselves,
proximity to which is decisive for smaller
places (Mykhnenko and Turok, 2008).
Moscow and St Petersburg are considered
to be most privileged here, with Moscow
especially enjoying an unprecedented concentration
of wealth (Gritsai, 2004;
Golubchikov and Badyina, 2006).
Smaller cities are usually imagined as sites
of a more troubled adaptation, although the
reality is more complex. Our analysis of the
relative performance of Russian cities, at
least for the period preceding the financial
crisis, reveals that, while all the cities above
700,000 perform at an average level or better,
the expectation that smaller cities would perform
in correspondence with their size does
not hold (Figure 1). Rather, they perform in
correspondence with their (inherited) specialisation.
At some level, this again may be
‘explained’ by the Soviet economy that
privileged networked complementarities of
cities’ functions and, consequently, created a
great divergence in urban economies.
Figure 1. Comparative economic performance indexes of cities of different size. Notes: The
index is based on a modified methodology of Golubchikov (2006); it combines a set of reliable
statistical indicators weighted to the population, including average monthly wage adjusted to
the regional subsistence level; fixed capital investment; the number of registered enterprises
and organisations; and the number of the registered unemployed. Each city was given a grade
on the scale from 0 (worst performance) to 1. Moscow and St Petersburg, with the highest
values of the index, are excluded from the illustration as outliers. Based on 2007 data.
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Single-industry towns, more specifically,
were an important part of the strategy for
decentralising and equalising spatial development,
while also extending the nation’s
urban frontier and urban network—now
above a quarter of all Russian cities and
towns belong to this category. The introduction
of competition and the ‘deglobalisation’
of the common economic space and industrial
chains have particularly negatively
affected cities specialising in textile manufacturing,
heavy industry, military production,
research and development, as well as in the
mining and timber industry (Lubovnyy,
2009). Yet, towns with export-oriented
industries have performed well. For example,
areas along the Ob River with rich oil and
gas reserves have even seen the establishment
of new towns, with the existing ones expanding
and doing well. Thus, although modest
in size, Khanty-Mansiysk (76,000 in 2010)
has become a fully developed administrative,
industrial and cultural centre.
Relationships between Legacy and Uneven
Development
This divergent adaptation of urban economies
to capitalism and their multiple
dependencies on the previous structures
accord with a body of evolutionary economic
geography that stresses path dependence,
lock-ins and the place-contingent
nature of self-reinforcing economic development
(Boschma and Frenken, 2006;
Martin and Sunley, 2006). However, as
MacKinnon et al. (2009) argue, path dependence
and related concepts need a firmer
grounding within a geographical political
economy to attend to the wider dynamics
of capital accumulation and uneven development,
including the issues of power, politics
and the territorial divisions of labour,
rather than be seen as structural causes per
se. As stated earlier, this call should be taken
seriously in relation to post-socialist
geography. Of course, literature here does
not deny the political economy in producing
territorial inequality (Smith and Timar,
2010), but in relation to the regional and
interurban scale at least, it rarely unpacks it
beyond the register of stylised facts about
neoliberalism, globalisation and, again,
path-dependent transition. Spatial inequalities
are expressed as the derivatives of path
dependence, where more dynamic and successful
places are imagined as less path
dependent and more ‘globalised’, whereas
the others as stagnant ‘socialist spaces’.
Rather than articulating the dichotomies
of ‘more successful’, rapidly changing places
as ‘more capitalist’ and those less successful
as ‘more socialist’, both need to be understood
as embedded in the matrix of capitalist
relationships, the hybrid product of the
subsumption of socialist spatialities by capital
and alienation of these spatialities from
their socialist ideological and institutional
history. Where the Soviet urban geography
served as a vehicle of the transformation
towards more egalitarian spatiality, the very
same ‘legacy’ now serves the reverse trend of
accelerated uneven development. In other
words, there is nothing about the legacies of
socialism as such that had predetermined
the particular patterns and magnitude of
uneven development before capitalism
enters the field. The core capitalist economies,
such as the US and the UK, have
hugely ‘unsuccessful’ and rigidly stagnant
places—which are no less capitalist than
their more ‘successful’ counterparts (which
are themselves internally fragmented).
Indeed, the conditions of territorial inequalities
and cyclical systematic stagnation of
some areas and growth of others determine
the capitalist spatialities, not socialist ones
(Davidow, 1976). The omnipresence of
unsuccessful places and, consequently, the
accelerated conditions of uneven development
are exactly what speaks of the triumph
of capitalism over the post-socialist space!
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Re-imagining all post-socialist spatialities
as essentially capitalist does not preclude the
necessity to understand the grounding of
capital accumulation in concrete social and
spatial conditions and the role of the latter in
uneven development (see Harvey, 2006),
although it is still important to maintain the
pre-eminence of capitalism and non-deterministic
readings. Uneven development
should be seen as a result of the ascendancy
of the logic of capital over inherited and subsumed
spatialities, which becomes the inherent
part of the hybrid spatialities of postsocialism.
It accelerates immediately with the
introduction of capitalism. Thus, in relation
to urban economies, it emerges from the
capitalist valorisation of inherited economic
assets subsumed to the capitalist requirement,
which certainly privileges those places
which can offer the greater and faster realisation
of capital. Under the conditions of systemic
disruption of the production chains in
the earlier stages of transition as well pandemic
asset stripping and destruction of
inherited values, this means accelerated
accumulation (or slower devalorisation) in
areas with certain basic levels of market
opportunities such as agglomeration effect,
accessibility and availability of tradable raw
material, ensuring primitivisation of the
national economy and rapid devalorisation
of capital and decline of other places.
Although this initial capitalist patterning
does create certain ‘path dependent’ effects
(although we prefer the less deterministic
metaphor of ‘inertia’ here), the dynamic of
uneven capital accumulation does not stop
at that stage but continue to respond to the
wider economic restructuring, as well as the
changing institutional landscape. The process
of ‘transition’ is a highly dynamic one
where the unfolding and juxtaposition of
various struggles producing the hybrid spatialities
are continuously peppered with new
discourses, decision-making in relation to
investment and disinvestment, production
and consumption, as well as alternations in
institutional practices. These render the
hybrid spatialities a highly open and fluid
evolutionary character, in a never-ending
process of change, the outcomes of which
are never fully predictable and whose very
past is being constantly remade by the present
as well as the (imagined) future. It is
noteworthy that, as growth has rapidly
intensified in Russia since 1999 (a phenomenon
that had been totally unexpected
itself), capital has begun a search for new
places for intensified accumulation. Apart
from city size, specialisation and location,
the factors of local policy and administration,
the quality of life and other local amenities
become more important in trapping
capital (Golubchikov, 2006, 2007a). Even in
the ‘premium’ centres, previous advantages
need to be augmented to keep (flexible) capital
in place and attract new flows, including
consumption-based. New ‘success stories’
appear for local policies that are able to
improve the position of cities in conjunction
with more ‘subtle’ inherited advantages
(Golubchikov, 2006, 2007a; Golubchikov and
Makhrova, 2013). We suggest here a hierarchy
of factors that characterise the priorities for
capital accumulation and, consequently, economic
capacities of cities at different stages of
their post-Soviet transformation (see Figure 2).
The further the restructuring process progresses,
the more discriminating the aspects
down the ladder become for relative urban economic
performance.
What are not featured in this schemata
are the state institutions of spatial governance.
These are part of the neoliberal-capitalist
regime that circumscribes this ladder
of spatial accumulation priorities in the
first place. Indeed, in comparison with the
Soviet past, when the whole state machine
explicitly sought to equalise spatial development,
the canons of state spatial policy
have been transformed, with the state being
now engaged in new formats of territorial
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development, actively or passively privileging
some places and penalising others.
This demands some further attention.
The Regulatory Landscape of Spatial
Development
Interestingly, Russia has no clearly outlined
urban strategy at the federal level; there are
rather different bits of legislation regulating
spheres related to urban and regional
affairs. Yet, one can argue that this fragmentation
is part-and-parcel of the neoliberal
regime of flexible and uneven spatial
accumulation (Golubchikov, 2010). For
example, one of the prominent documents
for national development is the Concept for
Long-term Development of Russia until the
year 2020 adopted in 2008. It envisages that
the regional development will be structured
around a few growth poles, which therefore
require particular national support. As the
then Minister for Economic Development
stated at the 2011 Moscow Urban Forum,
the 20 largest cities produce half of the
country’s GDP, while support of the ‘ineffective’
small cities ‘might’ cost 2–3 per
cent of GDP growth, with an implication
that large federal projects for the largest
cities should be given priority, while the
decline of small cities is an ‘ineluctable
global trend’ (Nabiullina, 2011). Such selffulfilling
prophecies reflect the actual politics
realised in Russia, echoing Brenner’s
(2004) analysis of the rescaling of the neoliberal
state. In 2011, just six of Russia’s 83
regions received 40 per cent of the federal
investment (Golubchikov and Makhrova,
2013).
The federal investment is directed at specific
cities or even their particular districts,
where the federal government has promoted
them as a strategic area for capital
accumulation. Examples include turning
Moscow into an international financial
centre, promoting St Petersburg as a world
city (Golubchikov, 2010), as well as hosting
international events, such as sporting and
cultural events and political summits. One
can even argue that mega events have taken
over much of the federal urban policy.
These include the 2012 APEC Summit
(Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation) in
Vladivostok and a number of sporting
events, including the 2013 Universiade in
I. Market size and access to capital
• City size rank
• City’s administraƟve status
• City’s geopoliƟcal locaƟon (e.g. regional affiliaƟon)
II. Access to key markets
1. The structure of local economy
2. LocaƟon relaƟve to large metropolitan centres
3. LocaƟon relaƟve to interregional transport links
III. Constraints of local factor condiƟons
• Natural resources and industrial resources
• Availability and quality of human resources
• Physical infrastructure and market infrastructure
IV. Constraints of local insƟtuƟons
• AdministraƟve infrastructure, government
• ‘Social capital’, the quality of life
• Urban and spaƟal planning
Increasing
role over
Ɵme
Figure 2. Time–space ladder of capital accumulation priorities.
Source: Golubchikov, 2007b.
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Kazan, the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi
and the 2018 FIFA World Cup. While the
levels of investment allocated for the preparation
of these have been unprecedented,
the choice of these cases has been arbitrary
and depended on the lobbying power by
regional elites. Such a highly selective and
non-transparent regime only fosters the
conditions for the uneven spatial development,
as also frequently demonstrated by
similar experiences elsewhere in the world
(see Gold and Gold, 2010).
One instrument that the national government
encourages regions and cities to
develop is a territorial programme for their
socioeconomic development, on the basis of
which cities are supposed to create their
‘image’ and compete between each other.
This predictably leads to another key
mechanism of accelerated uneven accumulation,
which Harvey (1989) has famously
identified as a shift from urban managerialism
to urban entrepreneurialism. Cities are
now expected to promote cultural events
and large development projects in order to
attract flows of consumption, as well as to
gain the benefits of central and regional government
support. In recent years, St
Petersburg, Kazan, Yaroslavl and Tomsk
have attracted considerable federal grants
for event celebrations, stimulating other
cities too to follow this path in lobbying for
central transfers. Many large cities (Moscow,
St Petersburg, Samara, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk,
Krasnodar and even Ulan-Ude) have established
international economic forums as
part of their ‘city branding’ (Vizgalov,
2011). Another form of city marketing has
been the construction of a ‘business city’
with iconic architecture. The examples
include not only Moscow with its MoskvaCity
and St Petersburg with Gazprom/
Okhta/Lakhta City (the project changed its
name and location in response to local protests),
but also Yekaterinburg, Perm,
Kemerovo, Volgograd, Nizhny Novgorod
and even Grozny, the capital of the war-torn
Chechnya where Grozny-City was built
along with one of the largest mosques in
Europe. Regional governments (alongside
city administrations) have become active
players, seeking to promote their central
cities in order to attract capital to the
regions. This means that regions increasingly
compete between themselves by articulating
and prioritising their regional
capitals—the process that further increases
the gulf between these centres and other
areas belonging to their jurisdictions.
It is becoming clear that the multiple
dependencies of the new economic geography
on the previous structures are actually
predicated on particular regimes of regulation
and accumulation. Three further
points are pertinent with respect to how
the new regime subsumes the inherited
structures. First, the new regime has considerably
‘flattened’ economic relationships.
The Soviet economy was based on the
nation-wide vertical co-ordination of the
flows of capital, knowledge, technology and
resources. The disruption of that complex
system, coupled with the breaking-up of
extensive production relationships, necessitated
the establishment of new linkages.
Moreover, the imperative of competition
was introduced, rendering the former
nation-wide co-operative and supplementary
economic mechanisms suddenly irrelevant.
In the new regime, each city, no
longer relying on the guiding and supportive
hand of state control and distribution,
has internalised, and capitalised on, its own
inheritance. It is because of this replacement
of the principle of egalitarian redistribution
by the neoliberal principle of selfreliance
that local conditions began playing
such an important differentiating role with
regard to spatial inequalities. Secondly, this
retreat to the internal spaces of self-reliance
has also been aggravated by trade liberalisation
and other processes associated with
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neoliberal imperatives. These processes have
further partitioned economic space along
the discriminating lines of international
competition and accessibility to world markets.
Clearly, industries based on shorter
production chains, as well as merchandising
services, have become privileged here.
Thirdly, and most importantly, it is not
only that the principle of egalitarian redistribution
has been replaced with the neoliberal
principles of self-reliance and competition,
but the new regime has also created preconditions
for the extraction of wealth from the
majority of people and places and its reconcentration
in the hands of the very few.
Under state socialism, the value extracted
from more productive agents was reinvested
in the less productive sectors, in addition to
financing the vast public expenditure (often
unprofitable, but important for social reproduction),
so that the return on reinvested
capital was often partial, but the potential
was being continuously accumulated for the
development of human and economic capital.
By contrast, the new regime is founded
on the ideology of maximising profits, a
reduced public sector and shortened investment
horizons. Even if the ‘institutional
thickness’ has been restored sufficiently to
prevent the economic agency from predatory
asset stripping (destruction of values),
the mass privatisation of public assets has
concentrated the wealth very asymmetrically
and this mode, supported by the institutional
regimes, will continue to reproduce
social and spatial inequalities.
Conclusions
In this paper, we have developed a critique
of post-socialist uneven interurban economic
development by viewing it from the
lens of the inseparability of the social, the
temporal and the spatial (Soja, 1996). The
legacies of socialism feature prominently in
this reading, but we reject simplistic flat
ontologies for the historicality of the postsocialist
spatiality. We argue that legacies,
while being the important condition for
post-socialist uneven spatial development,
need to be understood as the integral part of
the capitalist political economy, conducive
to the capitalist processes, rather than ‘alien’
carriers of history. We propose to read the
hybrid spatialities of transition, thus stressing
the mutual embeddedness of legacy and
capitalism in the co-production of postsocialist
spatialities. This hybridity is not
simply a description of differences between
old and new, nor even syncretism—a cultural
compromise between old and new. We
understand it as the subsumption of the
inherited systems into the very logic of capitalist
and neoliberal relationships, so that,
while capitalist practice feeds on the legacies
of state socialism, it also alienates them
from their history to make them the infrastructure,
and often the agency, for its own
expansion. Consequently, the spatialities of
post-socialism cannot be simply dichotomised
into the materialities and practices of
independent-of-each-other socialism and
capitalism, for this would reduce their complex
historicality. Rather, they are functioning
as capitalist spatialities, but bear signs of
the processes that extend deeper into their
history and which superficially may be taken
for their very nature—although it is myopic
not to see behind the familiar similarity the
deeply changed ideology, meaning and
practice.
We support the argument of Marxist theorists
that space exists in a dialectical relationship
with the social system, acquiring,
accumulating and conveying a particular
meaning in a particular social context
(Lefebvre, 1974/1991). Thus, the social and
physical conditions of cities and their fortunes
may seem to depend on their geography
and legacy, but the root causes of
their crises or otherwise are in the existing
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socio-political system which twists, distorts
or recreates the meanings of the inherited
landscape in its own image. This is why
when under state socialism the geographical
differences served the egalitarian project of
equalising development and urban crisis was
not possible (Davidow, 1976), under capitalism,
as Harvey (2010, p. 290) contends,
even minor inequalities ‘‘get magnified and
compounded over time into huge inequalities
of influence, wealth and power’’. Even
small differences in the relative space economy
inherited from state socialism now get
magnified into huge spatial inequalities, if
anything, supported rather than prevented
by the new geo-institutional regimes—an
observation that requires further serious
engagement with normative practices (see
Pike et al., 2007).
Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful for insightful comments
on the previous drafts of this paper by Vlad
Mykhnenko from the University of Birmingham
and the three anonymous referees.
Funding
Oleg Golubchikov would like to acknowledge
that this work was supported by the Economic
and Social Research Council [grant number
PTA-026-27-1997] and the British Academy
[grant number SG110692].
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