Twenty Years of Post-Soviet Union Urban Land Use Change of St. Petersburg

Abstract

Since the 1990s, Russia (the former Soviet Union, FSU) has undergone radical institutional transformation and drastic economic, political, and social changes. These changes have resulted in complex transformations of the urban land-use patterns. We extracted four major urban land-use classes (residential, industrial, social well-being, and green land) before (1987) and after (2015) the transformation of St. Petersburg. In particular, we focused on residential and industrial land use. In the core and peripheral areas of St. Petersburg, we calculated the percentage of each land-use class and conducted spatial pattern analyses for 1987 and 2015. Specifically, we measured the degree of interspersion/juxtaposition, aggregation and contagion for the major land-use classes in the study area. Results indicated that St. Petersburg experienced significant urban land restructuring from 1987 to 2015. While the city retained some urban land structure from before FSU, it showed trajectories of urban development similar to those of developed counties in Western Europe. The FSU period was the main stage of the outward expansion of urban administrative boundaries. The process of deindustrialization in the urban core during the post-Soviet Union period lagged behind other international cities. The most significant change in the urban land-use pattern was suburbanization in the peripheral area. The suburbanization of St. Petersburg was different from that of other developed countries in that it had its own unique characteristics, both in the residential style and in the resident class. Russia's institutional transformation had strong impacts on urban land-use patterns in the post-Soviet Union period, thus providing a rich practical and theoretical basis for analyzing new models of urban land-use change.