Siberia as Urban Space

In Russia every large urban center finds a day, usually in the summer, to celebrate their “city day.” Novosibirsk's was this past weekend.

Founded in 1893 as “Novo-nikolaevsk” (“novo” meaning “new” and “nikolaevsk” in honor of Tsar Nikolai II), it must have been hard to imagine at that time that the city had the potential to grow into Siberia's largest city. To the north (Tomsk), south (Barnaul), west (Tobolsk, Omsk) and east (Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk) were cites more than a century old that already functioned as trading and cultural centers for the vast region. Novo-nikolaevsk had really only one reason to be established – to serve as a base for building the railroad bridge across the Ob River. This, apparently, was one of the tricker parts of the building of the Trans-Siberian, and as the bridge was being built it became clear that the location of the settlement provided a number of serious strategic advantages for commerce and transportation.

The city grew quickly in the pre-Revolutionary years, but it did not earn its place as the region's unofficial capital until after World War II. Today the city is a large and growing metropolis of more than a million and a half people, but at the same time it is still in some sense seeking its identity. A recent article I read "Waif-cities" (“Goroda-besprizorniki.”A. Kozmin, S. Chernyshov, A. Popov. Ekspert.#24 (336). 18-24.06.2012. 10-18) put it this way: “Novosibirsk, born almost 120 years ago...quickly turned into a large trading center thanks to its advantageous geographical position. During [World War II] the city gained its industrial identity as a result of factories being evacuated from the European part of the country. Then Academgorodok,” one of the Soviet Union's most significant centers of scientific research, “was built there... but despite all these obvious advantages, there is still no true synergy between these parts of the city, they have been 'sewn together' by history in a chaotic way.”

The state of cities in Siberia is quite important for the fortunes of the territory as a whole, despite the fact that a significant amount of the region's vast mineral resources are located in very isolated areas. Approximately 70% of the population of our state is urban; this is consistent with the rest of Siberia... and urbanization continues. Yet, few of the cities have actually planned well for the changes that have faced them in the past two decades; instead, they've been busy “putting out fires.” Despite a dramatically improved economic situation, there are whole aspects of life that are difficult even to consider (e.g., the state of apartment buildings built in the 1950s-80s), though these problems will only increase. In the meantime the long-term problems of city development affect people on a daily level. To quote from the article again: “morning for a resident of any large Siberian city is full of inconveniences. Leaving his apartment building, the city dweller immediately falls... into infrastructure hell. He has a choice – either to go to work on public transport that is so overcrowded that to he  must use force to push his way through, or else to go in his car and inevitably stand in traffic jams for an hour or two. Just outside of his apartment door he runs into the "charms" of utility companies, Soviet clinics, dying factories, run-down parks and dozens of other urban problems, all of which make it impossible to feel comfortable. At the same time the official press turns out a stream of positive information – about constant road repair, building new bridges and interchanges, opening up new hospitals and parks. But from a subjective point of view it seems that the problems of cities are not being solved in a systematic way. And the government, distracted by impressive, but isolated projects, is not capable of finding real, serious solutions.”

One local architect, Tatyana Taychenacheva, says that the problem is that “we do not have a clear definition of a contemporary city.” This is in contrast to the “subjective feeling that we get from visiting, say, European cities – a person feels comfortable there on an subconscious level.” As the article notes “the economic growth of the 2000s did not bring about an equivalent growth in the level and standard of living...The expectation of people have risen together with their incomes, but their places of living (cities, towns, villages) have almost not changed at all. They still fail meet contemporary demands either in terms of their infrastructure or in terms of the quality of services. The result – a stable migratory pattern to the western part of Russia and to places abroad.” 

This post is getting rather too long, but I hope that it does a bit to explain the context in which I am working...and I cannot help but wonder, perhaps in the case of Novosibirsk, some of its problems could be solved by considering its origin. It was founded in order to build a bridge. If Novosibirsk, located directly in the east/west geographic center of the country, could be the bridge city today, it would be a meeting point for Russia's neighbors from relatively near-by Mongolia, China, Kazakhstan and Central Asia while still being a part of Russia's (mostly) European culture. Of course it is my hope that our churches, too, might make a positive contribution to this bridge-building work between cultures as well as providing a moral voice that calls for the protection of the most vulnerable as new ways of development are sought.