Russian Ghetto: The Imaginary Marginality of New Housing Estates

Abstract

Since the beginning of the 2010s, the new housing developments on the urban outskirts have grown dramatically: the newly built residential areas are partly constructed under the federal “integrated urban development” program. The media and urban planning and development experts strongly criticize these housing estates for problems regarding the social and transport infrastructure, the height of the buildings and the quality of public spaces. They term these peripheral estates as “ghettos” in order to point out existing problems and to suggest that these urban areas will experience degradation in the future. In doing so, experts refer to Western modernist housing estates, which now have bad reputations. Based on the study of Severnaya Dolina (Parnas) housing estate in St. Petersburg, this article considers the emergence and transformation of the academic concept of the ghetto, analyzes local meanings that the term acquires, and traces the practices that produce new peripheral residential areas as ghettos (in local meaning). It shows how the imarginality (or imaginary marginality) of a residential area is produced: analytically it is represented through two interrelated imaginaries — the present-ghetto and the future-ghetto. The article presents a detailed analysis of the components of these imaginaries employed by the media and urban development and planning experts. The empirical research demonstrates that the present-ghetto imaginary has no empirical grounds in the case of Severnaya Dolina. The article also highlights the performative effects of the ghetto category: the imarginality of a residential area can trigger the mechanisms that are inherent in the process of ghettoization.