1177 | 840 | Depopulating small monotowns: making sense of place and shrinkage in the non-metropolitan Latvia | Maris Berzins, Guido Sechi, Elina Apsite-Berina, Janis Krumins, Regita Zeila
Our study focuses on small, planned mono-industrial towns built in Latvia during the Soviet reign (the late 1940s and early 1980s). The devisal of these settlements had multiple roles: to bridge and possibly erase differences in urban/rural living standards, to connect and integrate Latvia into the Soviet industrial system, and to balance the spatial development of the whole settlement system. Moreover, this type of urban development created specific sociocultural environments that were, to a large extent, distinct from the traditional Latvian countryside. During the Soviet reign, these towns were a success story and the vanguard site of socialism. Nowadays, notwithstanding their morphological differences and partly different post-Soviet trajectories, these towns are experiencing urban shrinkage, physical decay of the built environment, demographical decline and economic restructuring or full deindustrialization. Thus, mono-industrial towns became the sites of socioeconomic tensions and uncertainties, as their originally planned functional role and place identity significantly changed leading to alienation among the local residents. The aim of our research is to illuminate how the post-Soviet transition has been experienced by this type of urban communities. The study adopts a mixed quantitative-qualitative approach. By employing socio-spatial analysis at a micro-geographic scale, this study uses individual-level data from the latest population census rounds and most recent population register data. The qualitative analysis is based on interviews with local residents revealing their attitudes towards urban change and the sense of local identity. The observed similarities and differences are mostly associated with the diverse degrees of functional transformations that the mono-towns have witnessed since 1991.
Maris Berzins, Guido Sechi, Elina Apsite-Berina, Janis Krumins, Regita Zeila
Univiersity of Latvia
ID Abstract: 840