Under the Sign of Deurbanization: The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Project of the Novosibirsk Regional Agglomeration

Abstract

Using the example of Novosibirsk, the largest city in the east of Russia, this article focuses on the methods and mechanics of working with the problems of urban territorial development in the Soviet period. The research object is the Priobsk industrial region project, whose spatial and economic projection at its formation was to become the Novosibirsk regional agglomeration in the 1950s and 1960s. The research method is based on a comparative typological analysis of spatial development structures. It is shown that the predominant source of population growth in the urban centers of Siberia was intraregional migration. A comparative analysis revealed the similarity of the processes associated with the restriction of the urban population growth rate initiated by Soviet and regional authorities at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s. Had it been implemented, the Priobsk industrial region project would have created the prerequisites for the creation of the Novosibirsk regional agglomeration, with the stabilization of the estimated number of people in Novosibirsk at 1.2–1.3 million people.

The support centers of the emerging regional agglomeration were “specialized subcentres” (in the polycentric form of urban cluster development of Peter Hall) or “emerging exurban realms” (in the urban worlds by Robert Lang and John Hall) found in ten regional cities and towns.

Addressing the issue through deterritorialization and reterritorialization, as ways of spatial interaction in an extremely mobile urban frontier, shows that the main actors of the process were industrial enterprise-production associations. Through the departmental vertical these industrial mini-conglomerates become the socio-economic field designers (represented by the physical and social space of Pierre Bourdieu) of the polycentric network of the never-realized Novosibirsk regional agglomeration project.