New focus for the blog

I wanted to continue this blog in order to cover issues in Russian cultural, social and political development that warrant more attention.
As a focal point, I will start with the efforts of an NGO in St. Petersburg that has taken an active role in empowering city residents to question and/or prevent urban development projects that affect neighborhoods and social uses of space. The most famous case they have worked on over the past two years is the fight to prevent construction of Okhta-Center, a nearly 400-meter-high skyscraper across the river from the baroque 18th-century Smolny Cathedral at the eastern edge of the historic preservation zone.

Consider this: the fight to keep neighborhoods and land use under a certain arrangement is not mere nostalgia or resistance to modernization, but a means to develop political participation. While to Western eyes the fight to prevent a skyscraper or a mall might look simply reactionary or “backwards,” in the contemporary Russian context we have to see the active elements of civil society which are working through architecture and land use against government policies that are non-transparent, with the goal not only of preserving certain buildings or uses but of creating that desired governmental transparency. Their efforts to sustain a particular arrangement of space are not just NIMBY (‘not in my backyard’) or anti-modernism. We observers have to reorganize our analysis: do we evaluate others’ actions based on loyalty to a particular architecture and a particular urban appearance, or to people who are trying to enact particular political values?
While some elements of the development community and municipal government have made honest efforts to address new economic realities and urgent needs for new infrastructure, the desires of residents have not been evenly taken into account. In the West we are used to approving the ‘highest economic use’ and basing our evaluations on that principle; in Russia many people still have an idea, roughly speaking, of ‘highest social use’ of space.