Publications

This article aims to contribute to the recent efforts of ISUF to bring closer and ultimately integrate the academic research on urban morphology and urban planning practice. Methodological differences between schools of urban morphology are a barrier to integration between research and practice. Qualitative schools focus on the historico- geographical approach of MRG Conzen and the process typological approach based on the work of Muratori (Oliveira, 2016)). Quantitative schools include Space Syntax (Hillier, 1996) and various spatial analysis methods primarily popularised by Michael Batty (2013). Each school brings its value to the urban morphology research, but even the academics may not always be able to appropriately select the methods according to particular problems they are trying to address (Oliveira and Medeiros, 2016).

There is a need for a unified approach to the study of urban morphology. Oliveira (2013) proposed such an approach (Morpho) on a street scale, later Oliveira and Medeiros (2016) demonstrated its application at the city scale. Building upon the Morpho methodology this paper assesses the urban form in Moscow using seven morphological measures. It then explores the effects of physical urban form in Moscow on urban vitality (where “vitality is what distinguishes successful urban areas from the others” (Montgomery, 1998)) characterised by (a) intensity of use of urban space (through analysis of mobile phone data and locations of businesses) and (b) land value (through residential rental rates – Xiao (2017) explored links between housing market and urban morphology extensively, but only in relation to a set of Space Syntax measures).

A metaphor of palimpsest is used to describe the multivocal cultural landscapes since the 1970s. Interventions into new cultural / humanistic geography, semiotics and the theory of regional geography help to regard each layer of the palimpsest as a constructed context, centered by dominant representation of a place. Real-and-imagined landscapes are regarded as palimpsests lived through everyday practices seen as processes of (re)construction of new layers. Trying to unite those “constructing’ and “living’ perspectives is a challenging task for urban cultural agenda. A series of mobile quest games was made by the author for Moscow Agency for Area Development through Culture in order to construct new tourist sights outside city centre. This project is discussed as a case of constructing new geographical contexts (palimpsest’ layers) and the lived experience rediscovering the distant residential areas, traditionally regarded as standardized “non-places’, as becoming rich in symbolic capital.

Konstantin Trofimenko (PhD), Director of Centre for Research of Urban Transport Problems, Institute of Transport Economics and Transport Policy Studies, and Nikita Krupenskiy (PhD), a senior research fellow at the Institute for Statistical Studies and Economics of Knowledge, both at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow, explain how digitalisation has been introduced to the cities of Russia and how its continued development is making city spaces and transport networks smarter.

The grand challenge of accessing fresh water and sanitation is a global concern. The intensity of challenge depends on the geographical location as well as the level of socio-economic development of individual countries. The present paper first reviews the key water-related global trends and examines the global agenda on water issues. Next the focus is turned on Russia. Despite of being one of the water-rich countries in the world, Russia faces a number of substantial administrative and structural issues in the water sector. Therefore, it is crucial to develop a long-term strategy for the management of this infinite, but strategic resource. The present paper develops long-term scenarios and strategies for the Russian water sector towards the year 2030. The study draws upon an earlier horizon scanning activity that identified a set of global trends and uncertainties related to water sector. This horizon scanning work is extended into alternative futures for the Russian water sector by using a combination of Foresight methods including scenario analysis, data mining, and various expert methods. Scenarios developed are characterized by a set of qualitative and quantitative factors and indicators of future developments in three key domains for the water sector: (i) the sustainability of water systems; (ii) water use by households and industry; and (iii) new water products and services. Scenarios present four alternative trajectories for the water sector that may also be applied for certain countries whose water sector is comparable with the Russia. Among the scenarios developed in the study, it is concluded that the most probable ones are Problem conservation and Losses and accidents. However, there is a possibility to revert these scenarios into more desirable trajectories, which are presented in other scenarios. For instance, a variety of new clean water technologies may be widely applied to achieve the Nearly perfect future (visionary) scenario.

Studying visual and plastic arts, social researchers tend to assume that an aesthetic object is pre-given to a viewer who does not participate in the process of the object’s becoming. They problematise the aesthetic status of an artwork, but not its objectness. This paper shows that audience perception, considered as interaction and situated practice, does not merely define the meanings and emotions attached to a certain object, but plays a constitutive role in the objects’ physical state and its very existence as an object, i.e. as an integrated unity extracted from its surroundings and affording a direct, intensive encounter. Synthesizing the conceptual resources of Hennion’s pragmatics of taste, Simmel’s aesthetic theory, gestalt theory, and social phenomenology, I explain various ways whereby an object in the situation of perception happens and achieves a certain mode of existence or fails to happen and disappears. The paper is based on three empirical examples derived from the ethnographic study of the open-air land art/architectural festival ‘Archstoyanie’. The first case illustrates how an object is extracted from the environment and the festival’s infrastructure; the second, how the visitors destroy the incomplete boundaries of an object so that it dissolves into the surroundings; and the third, how an object maintains its integrity despite its inner complexity and multiple centres attracting the visitors’ attention.

A comparison of Arctic cities in Russia with their counterparts in the southern parts of the country suggests that there are no significant differences in the degree of employment specialization or in many indicators of social amenities and services. The most important distinguishing feature of Arctic cities in Russia is the high mobility of their populations and the relative ease with which they move. The mobility of the Arctic population should be recognized as a kind of safety valve for the Arctic cities, underpinning their resilience in the face of changes in economic conditions.

Real estate expropriation for public needs is quite a common practice in Russia. Over the past 30 years, as private ownership of land and other real estate has developed in Russia, an objective need also developed for such expropriation, including forced real estate expropriation, based on judicial decisions, subject to “fair” compensation for the owners. Over the period, a regulatory environment emerged for handling cases, establishing grounds and procedures for real estate expropriation for State and municipal needs, and a certain enforcement practice was developed.

Before 1990, the Soviet government regarded private rental housing as a necessary evil that performs the useful function of mitigating housing shortage problems and supporting labor mobility… After 1990 and during the first two decades of the housing market’s development, Russian governments viewed rental housing as a residual segment of housing policy …

This chapter aims to shed light on the role that the private rental sector, in its various versions, played in centrally planned economics during the Soviet period and how it affected the development of housing systems during the period of transformation

Urban logistics seems to be a kind of «black box» for researchers and city authorities in the recent years, and as a result, a lot of research is limited to describing individual effects or setting out a course of planning a logistics system in urban conditions without taking into account some of its specific characteristics, such as influences of urban transport and environmental policy, urban spatial development; city authorities in turn prefer purely formal interaction with logistics companies and retail, introducing various kinds of prohibitive measures and without monitoring the results of their implementation. Thanks to the ongoing industrial revolution, radical changes are taking place, and digital technologies allow introduction of new management methods, which leads to fairly radical changes in city logistics. This article presents an overview of the changes that will affect the structure of the logistics chain. These changes are organized into 5 groups of factors: new technologies development, economic, environmental, social factors, external threats. Timely preparation for future changes will allow both logistics companies to correctly allocate available resources in the modernization of the logistics system, and city authorities to amend urban policy in the field of management and coordination of city logistics.

In the article necessity of state policy correction in relation to the cities in Russia towards decentralization and differentiation is stated. The mechanisms that allow to increase autonomy of the large cities and urban agglomerations are offered along with the corresponding calculations and expert estimates. Also attention is paid to the problems of absence at the state level of urban agglomeration concept and imperfection of state statistics concerning cities.

The most effective approaches to mental maps as an instrument of presentation of the complex cultural geographical research products are given as a result of comparative study. Two opposing paradigms of understanding ‘mental map’ as a term are revealed. The first deals with the orientation schemes present in the minds of personalities and/or visualized as abstract diagrams without obligatory spatial information or geographical coordinates given. The second is in fact a kind of geoimages serving as visual representations of individual or generalized visions of the given territory. They may be drawn by the informants according to the researcher’s task, or constructed by the scientist himself as a result of generalization of received data. Traditional geographical maps with thematic content representing space perception issues are regarded as a special branch of this kind of mental maps. The productive combination of two contradictory approaches with the systems of interconnected place characteristics justified by cultural geographical research ‘located’ at certain geographical coordinates is suggested. The examples of mental maps developed out of both approaches & meeting the mentioned criteria for complex cultural geographical research are given.