Post-socialist urban planning : Local needs in the City of Murmansk, Russia

Abstract: Urban research is aware of being culturally embedded, and inability to break free from history in some cases may explain why the change goes in a particular direction. After more than 70 years of centrally planned community and isolation, present urban structures in Russia stand as arenas for the system transitions. The political and socio-economic changes of the last decades had an impact on urban structures and relations between the different levels of planning. The municipalities are now assumed to be independent in terms of decision-making and local priorities, urban programs and civic engagement procedures. While the degree of success in urban development varies between the different Russian cities, the paper studies the local planning functions as well neighborhood governance and puts the results into the soviet planning context. By using in-depth interviews, the data has been collected providing a knowledgebase of the subject across the study area. The results show both various gaps of transformation (e.g. insufficient legislature, lack of local initiative and federal guidance, marginalized master plan, poor neighborhood governance) and path-dependent system (normativism, unsuccessful civic engagement, lack of communication between different institutions, companies and publics). The discussion argues that at the national scale the issue lies in the uncompleted socio-cultural transformation, which creates a quasi-existent planning system at the local level.