Publications

This book examines how contemporary urbanism is influenced by digital and low carbon transitions. From its infancy at the scale of individual buildings, a focus on ‘green’ agenda, energy, and resource efficiency has fostered research and policies for low carbon cities, eco-cities, and increasingly intelligent and smarter urban systems. Cities around the world are getting ‘smarter’ as more advanced technology is integrated into urban planning and design. People are relying more on digital and information and communication technology (ICT) in their daily lives, while cities are adopting more digital technology to monitor and gather information about people and their environment. This leads to Big Data collection, which is used to inform governance and improve urban performance. These transformations, however, raise critical questions, including whether emerging smart sustainable cities are too technocratic, but also with regard to citizen involvement. This brief addresses these important contemporary concerns through a review of literature and existing urban strategies. It should be of interest to everyone involved in advancing sustainable cities and smart cities. It should also be a relevant read for students and researchers in this area.

Fast-paced urban growth in China has produced a specific, transient form of urban periphery, which continuously shifts outwards as the city expands. Seeing this process as a distinctive type of (sub)urbanization, this paper encapsulates it under the notion of edge-urbanization. The paper argues that edge-urbanization in China is fueled by deliberate government policies, which seek to mobilize peripheral land for high-growth strategies. The relationships between urban expansions and spatial economic policy are analyzed more closely in the case of Tianjin. Geospatial analysis derived from satellite imagery for the period of 1980–2015 reveals the morphological and temporal dynamics of urban growth in the post-reform era. Built-up land in Tianjin has expanded 1.8 times during this period, with the dominant growth type being edge-expansion. This character of urban expansion is shown to be closely associated with government’s “project fever”—setting up development zones and new economic activity on city edge. The results demonstrate a decisive role of the state in shaping (edge) urbanization in China’s major cities.

For the multiproduct EOQ-models the analysis of several vehicles deliveries feasibility factoring in vehicle capacity is conducted. It is proved that such deliveries with an increase in the number of vehicles that simultaneously used for a single delivery cannot be effective, if a discount is not given for the cost of such a delivery. The necessary and sufficient condition that sets the threshold level of the discount, at which the deliveries by several vehicles are able to compete with the traditional solutions, is established. The cases of numerical calculations are presented in the article.

The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) – one of the USA federal government’s policy tool for preserving and encouraging the development and rehabilitation of affordable rental housing. LIHTC provides an incentive for home developers to build, buy and refurbish housing for low-income taxpayers and also provides a non-refundable credit for those who invest in low-income housing projects as a means of stimulating the flow of capital into this sector. The type of housing structures typically used for this credit are multi-family dwellings.

This chapter examines the role of green spaces in Moscow’s contemporary urban development and interrogates underlying tensions and contradictions. The study finds that Moscow’s new flagship parks form a key arena and infrastructure of neoliberalization – they have developed into new frontiers for commercialisation; they are places where neoliberal-subjects are forged; ‘participatory’ urban development is celebrated and where Moscow’s global competitiveness is negotiated. Yet, the current model is wrought with tensions. In particular, the superficial nature of urban reforms, changes in officially-sanctioned aesthetics as well as deteriorating economic conditions provide context-specific limitations and increasingly challenge Moscow’s current configuration of neoliberal urbanism.

The contemporary urban space is stressed to be complex, heterogeneous, multifaceted, interrelated. This vision of the new space constitution revives the idea of a palimpsest, as the latest embraces that very endless multiplicity co-existing in one & the same (totally urbanized) region. Lived / real-and-imagined urban regions are regarded as palimpsests with everyday practices seen as processes of (re)construction of new layers.

The palimpsestic idea of multiplicity of layers is especially useful in the Post-Socialist cities, as they are produced and reproduced through opposing, exaggerated, outdated or imposed imageries, and the meaning of Post-Socialism itself is multi-layered. Scholars studying the Post-Socialist landscape transformation focus on a certain value change creating that multiplicity.

The purpose of the paper is to present a theoretical framework of place as palimpsest combining the concepts of cultural geography (place as symbolically constructed), critical geography (thirdspace as lived space), regional geography and mythologies’ theory (constructing a place narrative), space semiotics (realizing the connections between those narratives) and place branding (the connection of brand identifiers to place identity) as embracing the complex multiplicity of Post-Socialist cities under the conditions of Post-Urbanity.

The methodological interconnections are used for a series of case-studies of outstanding places surrounding Moscow (Russia), from the search of the unique features of Yasenevo standardized residential district of the Soviet modernism of the late 1970s to the possible exopolis of Skolkovo Innovation Centre.

*The publication was prepared within the framework of the Academic Fund Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE) in 2019 (grant 19-04-052) and by the Russian Academic Excellence Project “5-100”.

The majority of cities all over the World have their symbolic capital concentrated in the central areas. Distant residential areas lack tourist attractiveness, original / authentic urban environments and any material / immaterial basics of local identities. People are not rooted in the urban districts they live in and feel Alien in them. There is no uniqueness in those residential areas (as seen by the residents), and there is no research or practical methodology to single out those unique features of a place and promote them as potential local brands.

In this paper I use the notion of place and a model of ‘place as palimpsest’ as emerging in cultural geography in order to discuss the possibilities of symbolic construction of new places and stimulation of local identities within currently ‘placeless’ distant residential areas of Moscow, Russia under the conditions of ‘post-urbanity’.

I thus aim to elaborate a methodology of picking up the unique features of distant urban residential areas regarded as place branding identifiers on the basis of the potential of the theory of regional geography and cultural geography combined together.

The development of cultural geography from the classical theories of the beginning of the XXth century (Sauer, 1925) to the second half of the XXth century was contradictory, yet important. The cultural turn has become a main trend of that change while the representatives of the new cultural geography criticized the Sauerian Berkeley school for focusing “their studies on the material artifacts, exhibiting a curious and thoroughly antiquarian ‘object fetishism’ over such items as houses, barns, fences and gasoline stations” (Price, Lewis, 1993, p. 3). Instead, they regard the cultural landscape through its human interpretation, symbolization and signification (Rowntree, Conkey, 1980). They stated that “the total cultural landscape is information stored in symbolic form” that “in part functions as a narrative” (Ibid., p. 461), and “the symbolic qualities of landscape, those which produce and sustain social meaning, have become a focus of research” as this “allows us to disclose the meanings that human groups attach to areas and places and to relate those meanings to other aspects and conditions of human existence” (Cosgrove, Jackson, 1987, p. 96).

That was the point when ‘place’ as a word turned into a scientific term: the place as being constructed by people through the process of signification. It was developed due to the cultural turn within new cultural / humanistic geography. “Space is transformed into place as it acquires definition and meaning”, Yi-Fu Tuan (1977 [2002], p. 136) states. Dennis Jeans found the exact words for that constructing perspective: “To make a place is to surround a locality with human meanings” (Jeans, 1979, p. 209).

That is how the place becomes a kind of a palimpsest: a “fuzzy set” of diverse interpretations of one and the same landscape, not only historically different elements, but also emerging from various ethnic, cultural, social groups in the process of mythological and semiotic communications (Mitin, 2010). Each layer of that palimpsest is in fact a vision of a place, a story told, a myth, a geographical description, that is, a narrative.

In order to study this process of symbolic construction of those layers / narratives I use the theory of regional geography. Different modes of regional geographical descriptions have been described throughout the XXth century (Darby, 1962, Davis, 1915, Hart, 1982, Paterson, 1974). Being opposed by the positivist view of storing the entire data on any place in a form of encyclopedic classification, the idea of a good description as a geographer’s art of constructing a place is as follows: “Good regional geography should begin with, and probably should be organized around, the dominant theme of each region, which of course will vary from region to region. <…> Features that are overwhelmingly important in one region may be completely missing in another, and the regional geographer should give pride of place in each region to its most important or significant features” (Hart, 1982, p. 23).

Combining (a) the idea of the cultural landscape as being constructed through symbolic values, and (b) the theory of regional geographical descriptions altogether form a model of place as palimpsest as being created and re-created. However, it is to a much extent settled within a representational paradigm of geography, disputed by critical urban / cultural geographers through the calls for rematerializing the discipline (Lees, 2002). In Lefebvrian terms, cultural geography in the XXth century has executed a shift from the material / perceived space towards the conceptual space of representations, but the forthcoming critical paradigm is concerned about the third realm, that is the “representational spaces: the space directly lived through its associate images and symbols, and hence the space of ‘inhabitants’ and ‘users’” (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 39), ‘thirdspace’, ‘real-and-imagined’ space (Soja, 1996). Lefebvre moves forward describing what kind of space it is. It is the product of the urban revolution, the totally urbanized space “constituted by a renewed space-time, a topology that is distinct from agrarian (cyclic and juxtaposing local particularities) and industrial (tending towards homogeneity, toward a rational and planned unity of constraints) space-time. Urban space-time <…> appears as a differential <…>. The urban space is complete contradiction” (Lefebvre, 1991, pp. 37-39). It is stressed to be complex, heterogeneous, multifaceted, interrelated. This vision of the new space constitution revives the idea of a palimpsest, as the latest embraces that very endless multiplicity co-existing in one and the same place.

What is needed, is to shift the focus from those layers being constructed to the places being lived and experienced. That is exactly the point and the method I develop in my project on complex cultural geographical research of Yasenevo area in the outskirts of Moscow, Russia. I use a series of in-depth semi-structured interviews in order to try to single out what that standardized Soviet residential district is really unique and peculiar for local residents and plan to promote and use those ‘local specialties’ in a few cultural events in late 2019.

The project develops a multidisciplinary theoretical framework and is also practice-oriented. It is aimed at finding the unique features of a place, making it different from all the others, and promoting those features as the basis of local identities, connecting people into sustainable local community and thus symbolically constructing a meaningful place.

*The publication was prepared within the framework of the Academic Fund Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE) in 2019 (grant №19-04-052) and by the Russian Academic Excellence Project “5-100”.

This paper tests whether the implementation of a key market-oriented reform in post-Soviet Russia, property rights in land, proxied by the percent of privatized land by region, affected the pace of sub-national economic growth during two unprecedented expansion periods: 2001-2008 and 2010-2014. Individuals gained the Constitutional right to own land in 1993, but implementation was stalled. The pace of land privatization can be explained by arguably exogenous factors such as distance to Moscow, as well as climate and also regional political culture, proxied by concentration of votes in the 2004 presidential election. We show that this rate of land privatization in Russia’s regions was significantly associated with output growth in 2010-2014, confirming the policy importance of this measure for developing economies. Regions where private holdings expanded most rapidly with the enforcement of property rights in land, gained a competitive advantage in the growth process through increased investment in fixed assets and private consumption.

This paper examines territorial practices of enclosure in the Russian land commune. Using archival research, it explores how the state and territory in the periphery were dialectically co-produced through spatial technologies and public discourses. This work brings a territorial dimension into Russian agrarian scholarship by positioning the imperial rural politics within the context of capitalist land enclosure, thereby introducing complexity into the state-centric Western territory debate.

In 2016 passenger service on the Moscow Central Circle (MCC, a circular urban rail line in Moscow) was reintroduced after its closure in 1934. The launch of this line allowed us to study the effects of a transport infrastructure project using observed rather than model-forecasted data.

We collected empirical data on changes in real estate values, land use, transportation flows and travel behaviour as consequences of integration of the new rail line into existing urban transit system.

The research project consists of several parts. First, we studied residential rent rates. The rent growth effect was most substantial in the residential areas around Moscow Central Circle stations without access to existing metro stations.

Second, we used the Node-Place model to evaluate the magnitude of the potential (and officially planned) land use changes in the long-run, i.e. the increase in the place value. We revealed that the long-term MCC impact is modest, because the opportunities for land use change around the MCC stations are currently limited and therefore the increased node value is not accompanied by the proportional change of the place value.

Third, we used Moscow Metro origin-destination matrices for typical working days in March 2016 and March 2017 to evaluate the impact of the MCC on the redistribution of passenger traffic volumes. We observed an insignificant decline in load level of Metro Circle line and radial lines and interchanges in the city centre.

Finally, we studied changes in travel behaviour. The majority of respondents do not use the MCC to reach locations near new stations but use it mostly to optimise their existing routes, which also supports the findings of the relatively low place value of the territories around the new stations.

Repeating the same measurements regularly will allow us to monitor the changes in the use of the MCC and track its performance and its effects over time. This paper covers the short-term effects that occurred in the first 12 months of the MCC operation.

Urban population is growing worldwide. Our societies are facing grand challenges like climate change and growing inequalities between people. There is an increasing need to develop cities that are environmentally and socially sustainable, functional and supporting well-being of their inhabitants. When striving towards these goals, transportation and mobility play a crucial role. Easy and environmentally sustainable mobility options are called for in most cities. For these to attract users, they need to be safe and pleasant, providing positive experiences and well-being in addition to efficiency in time or cost.

NECTAR conference is organized with a title “Towards Human Scale Cities – Open and Happy” to reflect the new requirements of urban transportation. This 15th NECTAR conference, organized in Helsinki 5th - 7th June 2019, provides presentations by world-class keynotes Mikael Colville-Andersen and Professor Tim Schwanen, who approach human scale mobility from the viewpoints of a designer and a researcher. More than 140 scientific presentations explore advancements in the field of transport, communication and mobility, with a particular focus on good quality mobility options for people. The focus of the conference is urban transportation and the new possibilities that open data and digital technologies provide for mobility solutions and their research. Presentations provide food for thought concerning mobility choices and quality, new mobility solutions like MaaS, and policies that are implemented to support them.

Helsinki offers an interesting environment for the 2019 NECTAR conference. It is the home of the busiest passenger harbor in Europe with a twin-city development with Tallinn across the bay, and a major air transportation hub between Europe and Asia. It is one of the fastest growing capital regions in Europe, with large densification developments taking place in old logistic centers: harbor areas of Jätkäsaari and Kalasatama and a train depot in Pasila. Public transportation is valued high by citizens, as well as politicians and planners making investment decisions for the future. First robotized buses are in operation and MaaS solutions are emerging. New bike sharing system is one of the most used in the world and has expanded to cover most of the city region. As everywhere in Europe, new forms of micromobility from electronic scooters to electric longboards are appearing on the streets making planners and police puzzled. The city has profiled itself as an open city: large amounts of open data about the region have been made available and the region of Helsinki is committed to open and transparent decision 

and policy making. This supports also research in the major universities: University of Helsinki and Aalto University, the local organizers of the conference.

We anticipate that the conference days will forward our thinking on how to make cities more sustainable, functional and pleasant for people, and how to study them scientifically in a meaningful and transparent manner.

wikimapR is an R package for accessing the raw vector data from Wikimapia via official Wikimapia API. Map data is returned as Simple Features (sf) objects with some of the object details included as nested lists.

The article is devoted to a new type of lawsuits - the obligation of the administrative defendant to refrain from committing certain actions, which appeared with the adoption of the new Code of Administrative Court Procedure of the Russian Federation. The article explores how such issues are reflected in the latest courts’ practice. The author points out that these lawsuits can be considered as “strategic litigation”. Such type of lawsuits is a progressive method of judicial remedy, as they allow solving urban problems for many residents at once. For example, claims with requirements to refrain from construction; protection of the rights of persons with disabilities; challenging the refusal to hold public meetings; lawsuits against the demolition of commercial facilities; the requirement to refrain from committing actions to restrict access to public spaces; and a number of others.

The article is aimed to clarify the contradictory nature of the urban atmosphere phenomenon by defining its’ nuances and the genesis of its’ appearance in social sciences. Such approach will help to conceptualize the phenomenon and will lead to the creation of the future urban atmosphere model suitable for further operationalization.

The research is represented by the theoretical analysis of works interested in urban atmosphere phenomenon in the field of sociology, phenomenology, management, literature, cultural geography.

The work can be divided into two parts. The first part describes the differences between urban atmosphere nuances, namely ambiance and atmosphere, and define them. Then the second part provide us with the information about ambiance and atmosphere origin and the process of its’ development from ancient times to this day. In the end of the article the necessity of taking into account the urban atmosphere shades, when dealing with model creation, is argued.

According to the analysis the atmosphere is invisible but is characterized by magnetic properties making the urban space attractive for living bodies. The ambience is produced by the atmosphere, but have the more pronounced qualitative properties which characterize the urban space. The ambience influence on our lifetime by mediating the relations between living bodies.

The consideration of the urban atmosphere genesis in different research fields showed that the atmosphere has been studied mainly within natural science and literature as descriptive quantitative phenomenon aimed to define the space of existence for living bodies.  Whereas the ambiance, full of qualitative and tangible characteristics, has been appeared later and has been borrowed by a number of research disciplines (such as sociology, psychology, economics, management) as possible to be analyzed and slightly applied in practice.

According to the analysis the author reaches the conclusion that the urban atmosphere is the highly constructed phenomenon consisting of either atmosphere, or ambience. The second one is the qualitative continuation of the first one and the characteristics of both shouldn’t be overlooked when conceptualizing the phenomenon. The analysis also showed that the functioning principles of physical atmosphere and ambiance can be applied in the model creation. It is connected with the absence of explanation of urban atmosphere and ambience functioning by social scientists. The application of these principles from physics will provide the full scheme of urban atmosphere components interrelation and interaction.

The study of the problems of spatial development and management of the territories of economic development of the Russian North and the Arctic finds relevance within the implementation of the tasks outlined in the Strategy of spatial development of the Russian Federation and the State program of socio-economic development of the Arctic zone for the foreseeable future. Providing the sustainable development and spatial connectivity of the Arctic regions is necessary for the development and practical application of effective organizational and economic solutions.

The paper analyzes the state policy in the field of socio-economic development of the Arctic regions of Russia, assesses the role of the Northern sea route as an important driver of development of the Arctic regions. Based on the analysis, key conclusions are drawn about the factors such as low population density, low level of infrastructure development, significant distance from the main industrial bases of the country, unfavorable climate for living and economic activity etc which affect and increase the risks of economic activity on spatial development of the Arctic regions.

In these conditions, the priorities of the Strategy of spatial development of the Arctic zone of Russia should be the modernization of its entire transport and logistics system. The most effective forms of spatial organization of the economy and its governance may be territorial clusters, as well as territories

of advanced socio-economic development. They could help in ensuring the implementation of an integrated approach to the development of the Arctic territories and contributing to the diversification of the Arctic region’s economy, attracting investment and thereby improving the quality of life of the population.

The practical significance of the conclusions lies in the possibility of their use in updating strategies and programs for the development of the regions of the Russian North and the Arctic in order to form an effective mechanism of governance for coordinating economic activities and providing an integrated approach to the development of these territories.

Cultural landscape is a key concept within cultural geography, changing its meaning together with social & scientific development. The shift from new cultural geography & Russian geohumanities regarding cultural landscape as a representation towards critical geography is discussed. The latter describes cultural landscape as a totally urbanized thirdspace, lived & differentiated landscape combining physical, mental & social spaces. An example of Skolkovo Innovation Centre in Moscow as an exopolis is discussed as a new urban form of postmodern cultural landscapes.

From methodological standpoint, a comprehensive study of post-urbanism imply a cognitive fixation any spatial events as co-spatial. We can talk about the co-existence of different cognitive / ontological regimes in the post-urban reality, which themselves can also be called co-spatial. Co-spatialities, understood as a communicative event nodes, can be considered as key elements in prototypical imagination map of post-urban space. Post-urban geo-cultures, producing a variety of cartographies of the imagination, are a fundamentally heterotopic. Different communities become post-urban, forming their transversal cartographies of the imagination, constantly proliferating, becoming more and more co-spatial and, consequently, generating this post-politics, which aimed at accelerating multiple dispersion of communicative events. Post-urban communities create a post-political situations, in which the cartographies of the imagination becomes the basis of new urban landscapes or new geo-cultures. Post-city develops practices and processes of hetero-textuality when the texts of individual geo-cultures not assume a common space of reading, the plan of value and the plan of expression, and becoming only in terms of consistency as the landscape modulations, immanent to imaginary cartographies. Any post-city cartography of imagination supports special landscape modes which create the realities of material and mental character. Any cartography of imagination can phenomenologically think as the line becoming a particular identity of individuals and communities. Post-nomadic mobilities lead to the coexistence of multitudes of such cartographies, whose event co-spatialities create a post-political communities, manipulating differences "velocity" of multiple communicative discourses. The creation of new cartographies of imagination forms post-urbanism as an art of detailed co-spatialities.