Regionalization of Urban Planning

Leningrad has been a pioneer in regional planning throughout the Soviet period, just as it was before. From the days of Peter I and Catherine II, the region's historic integration was fostered by the development of satellite palaces and cities.^[91] Kolpino, Kronstadt, and Petrodvorets were all established during Peter's reign, Lomonosov and Pavlovsk during that of Catherine; Pushkin was formally incorporated

in 1808, and Sestroretsk followed in 1917.^[92] All these cities were brought together under the jurisdiction of the Leningrad city soviet in December 1931.^[93] By the mid-1960s, another two dozen or so communities had similarly been brought under the supervision of the Leningrad city soviet.^[94] Then, in 1966, city planners were able to incorporate the entire Leningrad suburban zone into the city's new general plan.^[95] Nevertheless, although local elites and common citizens both recognized the presence of a large suburban region around the traditional city limits, few saw these interrelated areas as a single regional urban system , where urban, suburban, and rural areas were locked together as part of a functional unit.

Since the late 1950s, there has been a revolution in the thinking of Soviet urban geographers, economists, and urbanists concerning the nature of the "city."^[96] Soviet scholars no longer consider the city merely a large population point. Instead, conventional wisdom has come to define cities as hubs in an agglomeration of settlements linked by various functional subsystems into a unified whole and extending across the length and breadth of the Soviet Union. These views suggest the substantial intellectual impact of the systems approaches of the West on Soviet social science.^[97] We will also observe this influence in Chapter 6 when we discuss the emergence of socioeconomic planning. Such procedures combine social and economic subsystems as part of a unified and interrelated system. We can possibly detect an even more pervasive influence of systems analysis in the recent intellectual history of Soviet urban geography.

The ascendancy of systems theory in the body of Soviet thinking about cities can be seen on several different levels. An extensive body of theoretical literature has appeared in recent years describing the systemic nature of Soviet settlement patterns. Since the late 1950s, a number of geographers, including Georgii Lappo, Boris Khorev, David Khodzhaev, and Kazys Seselgis, have pioneered in establishing a distinctively Soviet outlook on urban agglomerations. This literature eventually produced the overarching concept of the Unified Settlement System (Edinaia sistema rasseleniia —ESR) encompassing the entire Soviet Union.^[98] Several Leningrad scholars contributed both to the development of that concept and, more generally, to an emerging literature on the city as a system. Indeed, their contribution represents one of the major findings of this study.

At a more practical level, systems approaches to the city have fostered urban planning and management philosophies that seek balanced and harmonious regional development of urban centers in their entirety rather than exclusively promoting the physical development of the central cities.^[99] Some authors, such as Leningraders Ivglaf Sigov, Nikolai Agafonov, and Sergei Lavrov, as well as Muscovite Boris Khorev, identify the goal of balanced development as a primary feature

of Soviet settlement theory, thus differentiating it from systems approaches to urbanization emanating from the capitalist West.^[100]

Moscow University geographer Khorev was for a long time a particularly prominent Soviet advocate of urban systems theory. He began vociferously to advocate systems approaches during the late 1960s and early 1970s when he first discussed the Unified Settlement System. His volume Problemy gorodov (Problems of Cities ), a work that sought to demonstrate the existence of such a settlement pattern, is still a basic textbook of urban geography in Soviet undergraduate and graduate programs.^[101] Khorev elaborated his notions further in more specialized works, among them a coauthored discussion arguing for the necessity of developing an effective demographic policy for the Soviet Union.^[102] Khorev defines the balanced and harmonious development of interrelated industrial, transportation, resource utilization, spatial, and social policies as the primary objective of urban and regional planning efforts.

One critical element in conceptualizing the urban system has been the companion notion of the urban hierarchy. Here the Soviet penchant for putting everything in its appropriate hierarchical niche combines with the systems classifications of the West in a steady flow of efforts to assign every Soviet community to some national, republican, regional, or local settlement pyramid. In the Ukraine, for example, Petr Kovalenko has identified a three-tier urban system that is itself a subsystem of the national urban settlement pattern.^[103] According to Kovalenko, this Ukrainian subsystem incorporates major population centers (Kiev, Kharkov, Donetsk, Odessa, and L'vov) and large ones (Poltava, Cherkassy, Kherson, and others), as well as medium and small ones, into a unified hierarchy. Kovalenko finds that the republic's major and large urban centers have their own extensive subsystems, with urban agglomerations growing up around such cities as Kiev, Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk, and Odessa. He then chronicles the various functional subsystems (industrial, commercial, cultural, scientific, and so on) that become integrated through their relationship to the overall urban settlement system. He concludes by arguing that Ukrainian planners should not view the city as merely a population point. Instead, it has become the nexus of a series of multifaceted and multifunctional economic, spatial, and cultural subsystems.^[104]

Oleg Litovka has been engaged in a similar study of the Leningrad urban region,^[105] identifying several tiers of urban settlements around the first-tier center of Leningrad. For Litovka, Novgorod and Pskov represent second-tier centers linked to the Leningrad agglomeration, while such communities as Vyborg, Luga, and Boksitogorsk are third-tier focal points (see Map 2).

Leningrad social scientists have made significant contributions to new conceptualizations of the "city." These include the general theo-

retical works of such geographers and economists as Nikolai Agafonov, Evgenii Murav'ev, Sergei Uspenskii, Oleg Litovka, and Marat Mezhevich, which examine the methodological problems of investigating socialist settlement patterns. Much of this work has been based on studies of the Leningrad region.^[106] One practical result of such academic endeavors has been to persuade planners that the Leningrad agglomeration in fact includes the entire area within 90 minutes' commuting time from the city center by rail, and not just those areas traditionally considered to be part of the metropolitan region or subordinate to the city soviet.^[107]

The widespread acceptance of systems approaches to urban settlement patterns drastically altered Soviet urban planning practices in general and Leningrad planning approaches in particular. The central focus of planners shifted from the specific structural environment of a given urban area to the interaction of that region with its surrounding communities through, various demographic, economic, spatial, transportation, communication, cultural, and environmental subsystems. This movement from a static architectural view to a dynamic systems view of the planning process marked a significant departure from traditional Soviet urban planning and managerial strategies.

In the case of Leningrad, the transformation meant that city administrators no longer saw their city merely as the urban system that was in place at the time of Alexander I. Instead they have accepted the vision of a "Leningrad" that comprises an extensive interlocking network of central, suburban, and exurban districts, many but not all of which are now under the jurisdiction of the Leningrad city soviet—rather than the regional soviet—and all within a relatively well-defined commuting radius of the city center.

The consequences of such a metamorphosis have been substantial. While the city's boundaries and direct authority were not extended outward, regional state and party agencies came to provide an integrating mechanism for the entire metropolitan region. In recreational design, for example, a new spectrum of nonurban facilities has fallen within the range of options open to Leningrad planners.^[108] Similarly, industrial location policies are no longer limited by old geographic boundaries; nor, for that matter, are capital investment strategies.^[109] Finally, planners have begun to consider the removal of entire urban functions from the central city to self-contained settlements on the periphery. In this last regard, Leningrad architects developed plans for self-contained academic communities, to the southwest of the city near Petrodvorets for the new campus of Leningrad State University, and to the north at Shuvalovo for the new complex of the USSR Academy of Sciences' Leningrad Scientific Center.^[110]

In addition to expressing academic theories and planners' visions, expansion of the concept of the city and region conformed closely to

long-standing political and institutional arrangements. Throughout the postwar period, regional institutions and officials have dominated the Leningrad Communist Party organization. Consequently, institutional and political frameworks to support regional urban management approaches were already in place long before the 1970s. Since urban management and planning decisions had previously been made on a scale larger than the boundaries of the central city and adjacent suburbs, regional political elites probably viewed the new planning approaches as the logical extension of existing institutional patterns.^[111]

By the 1970s, then, the same factors that will be mentioned in our next policy studies (academic expertise, enlightened administrative responses, and regional political custom) produced an innovative response to inadequacies in public policy implementation—in this case, inadequacies in the 1966 general plan. The plan's static architectural nature and its relatively confined geographic scope came to be widely rejected in Leningrad and elsewhere.^[112] As in the other policy areas, Leningrad scholars, managers, and politicians were ahead of their colleagues, their inventiveness taking the form of a series of proposals incorporating the entire oblast into a new Leningrad general plan.^[113]