Grassroots mobilization and urban politics in Putin's Russia (original) (raw)
The economic growth of the 2000s radically transformed the urban landscape in Russia: developers and local authorities forged the powerful alliances much alike "growth coalition", new planning tools were implemented, and the general public has gradually became engaged with the urban affairs. However, experiments with urban development in Russian cities have been regularly faced with discontent on behalf of its dwellers: local movements against infill construction, "hoodwinked" house investors, environmental grassroots organizations and other local urban protests emerged as a factor in urban politics. Using the "Contentious Politics in Russia" dataset, which captures public protest events in Russian regions on the timespan of 2012-2014, and in-depth study of some cases, I present an exploratory analysis of causes and variation in grassroots urban mobilization. Political transformations in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union have been consistently studies from the ―bird's eyes‖ perspective, which allows to capture the shifts in the architecture of power. The emergence of new political institutions and modes of governance, changes in electoral politics, recurrent patterns in regime-opposition interactions received a generous attention from the scholarly community. How do these structural shifts affect the everyday life of ordinary people and how do citizens react and adapt to the changes in power relations and institutional environment remain understudied. Urban mobilization constitutes a prospective scholarly field in this regards: it is close enough both spatially and analytically to the everyday life of individuals, but it is also well-situated both for comparative and contextual-specific analysis. For centuries, cities have been an arena for contestation and political struggle (Castells 1983, LeGalles 2002), more recently the debates shifted towards the impact of neoliberalism (meaning marketization and privatization of urban space) on urban development and power relations between different interest groups. Russian cities are an excellent ground for testing different theories and improving the scientific understanding of how structural processes are related to individual lives.
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