(Routledge) The world is undergoing the largest wave of urban growth in the history of mankind, and the circumpolar regions are not exempt from this global process. This evolution is linked to the development of industrial activities, as well as to the rise of services, public administration, and tourism. While this trend affects all circumpolar countries, it impacts Russia the most. Russia has built a unique urban fabric in the Arctic, with half a dozen cities of between 100,000 and 300,000 inhabitants. Because of their combination of historic, demographic, and economic features, Russian Arctic cities offer a distinctive field to observe and understand issues related to circumpolar urbanization.
This book provides the first in-depth, multidisciplinary study of re-urbanization in Russia's Arctic regions, with a specific focus on new mobility patterns, and the resulting birth of new urban Arctic identities in which newcomers and labor migrants form a rising part. It is an invaluable reference for all those interested in current trends in circumpolar regions, showing how the arctic is becoming more diverse culturally, but also more integrated into globalized trends in terms of economic development, urban sustainability, and migration.
Table of Contents
Introduction (Marlene Laruelle)
Part I: An Evolving Demographic, Political, and Economic Context
1. Depopulation of Russia’s Asian North and the Impact on Political Development (Nikolay Petrov)
2. Shaping Russia’s New Arctic: The Union of Cities in the Arctic and the High North (Genevieve Parente)
3. Reluctant Entrepreneurs of the Russian Far North (Aimar Ventsel)
Part II: New Mobility Patterns
4. Migration Cycles, Social Capital, and Networks: A New Way to Look at Arctic Mobility (Nadezhda Zamyatina and Alexey Yashunsky)
5. Infinite Travel: The Impact of Labor Conditions on Mobility Potential in the Northern Russian Petroleum Industry (Gertrude Saxinger)
6. The Urbanization of Indigenous Peoples of Northeastern Siberia (Vera Kuklina and Natalia Krasnoshtanova)
Part III: A Growing Multiculturalism
7. Social Dynamics and Sustainability of BAM Communities: Migration, Competition for Resources, and Intergroup Relations (Olga Povoroznyuk)
8. Murmansk: A City’s Soviet Identity and its Transforming Diversity (Marlene Laruelle, Sophie Hohmann, and Alexandra Burtsveva)
9. Ugra, the Dagestani North: An Anthropology of Mobility Between the North Caucasus and Western Siberia (Denis Sokolov)
