New Neighbours in New Urban Districts in Large Russian Cities: Constructing Scenarios of Neighbouring

Abstract

Abstract This chapter focuses on the newness of neighbour relations and new scenarios of neighbouring that have emerged in the recently built residential districts of large Russian cities – Moscow and St Petersburg. In the last decades, the scenarios of neighbouring in Russia have undergone significant changes due to the collapse of the Soviet system and the formation of a new sociality. In this situation, new urban districts have become a testing ground where new scenarios of neighbouring have been developed in everyday communication. The study finds that the emerging scenario of neighbouring differs from lifelong Soviet neighbouring with its close personal contacts, as well as from the isolationism of the 1990–2000s, and is based on the management and flexible reconfiguration of neighbour relations. This chapter argues that the newness of urban settings is a special state that influences neighbour relations and leads to enthusiasm for, and intensification of, interaction between neighbours; the invention of new forms of neighbour relations; and the actualisation of neighbour solidarity in a space that is still deficient in other ways. While newness is a state that allows creative forms of sociality to flourish, it is also a limiting state in the way it imposes absence and deficiencies upon residents that requires them to create new, compensatory structures and solidarities.

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