LA FABRIQUE METROPOLITAINE DU GRAND MOSCOU - Archive ouverte HAL Accéder directement au contenu
Thèse Année : 2022

Building Greater Moscow as a Metropolitan City

LA FABRIQUE METROPOLITAINE DU GRAND MOSCOU

Vladimir Pawlotsky
  • Fonction : Auteur

Résumé

This Geography-Geopolitics Ph.D. dissertation analyzes power rivalries on the metropolitan territory of Moscow after 1991 and combines field surveys, statistical and cartographic analyses and an important review of literature. It studies the strategies, instruments and discourses of Moscow urban area stakeholders in their struggle for the capture of equipments, infrastructures, companies, investments and households generating tax revenues. This struggle takes place in a triple context: global competition between world-cities or metropolises; federal centralisation of powers and population decrease; regional tensions between Moscow and its suburbs. It dissects the structure of the governance of the urban area marked by 15 years of rivalries born from the institutional distinction between the federal city of Moscow on the one hand and the Moscow Oblast, the region that surrounds it but of which it is not administratively a part, on the other hand. If the federal city of Moscow and the Moscow oblast are two distinct entities, in what framework and in what way can the urban and metropolitan areas of Moscow develop if they are by essence bi-regional? What kind of interactions does the Russian federalism allow between these two subjects? Are bi-regional governance instruments emerging with the "right scope" and "right competencies," i.e., on the scale of the metropolis and commensurate with the challenges faced by the vast macro-region of Moscow? What urban morphologies are emerging as a result of the consensual and/or conflictual relations between the two entities? What territorial reconfigurations can be observed? What issues does the emergence of such a metropolis raise in the fragile Russian economic and demographic balance? In other words, how can a global metropolis be fashioned in a context of a regional and fragmented governance in the era of post-Soviet Russian federalism? It turns a series of "coveted developments" and "disputed territories" into "local geopolitical laboratories". They are the targets of hoarding strategies by various stakeholders who often practice misappropriation and embezzlement to win highly lucrative tenders. The thesis then analyses the appointment by president Dmitri Medvedev in 2010 of Sergey Sobyanin as mayor of Moscow, as the "return of the federal government" to Moscow. This appointment sets in motion the creation of a world city on two main fronts: Greater Moscow, which aims to provide the agglomeration with a system of "good governance" in terms of transport, and New Moscow, which aims to provide the capital with the territorial reserves necessary for its "good development". To synthetize, the dissertation contributes to urban geography and local geopolitics by studying urban governance, making Moscow an original case study to illustrate the metropolitan processes of political and territorial reconfigurations many cities are subjected to. It sheds light on the mechanisms that govern the Moscow metropolitan fabric and highlights the systemic limits and malfunctions inherent to Russian federalism in this area.
This Geography-Geopolitics Ph.D. dissertation analyzes power rivalries on the metropolitan territory of Moscow after 1991 and combines field surveys, statistical and cartographic analyses and an important review of literature. It studies the strategies, instruments and discourses of Moscow urban area stakeholders in their struggle for the capture of equipments, infrastructures, companies, investments and households generating tax revenues. This struggle takes place in a triple context: global competition between world-cities or metropolises; federal centralisation of powers and population decrease; regional tensions between Moscow and its suburbs. It dissects the structure of the governance of the urban area marked by 15 years of rivalries born from the institutional distinction between the federal city of Moscow on the one hand and the Moscow Oblast, the region that surrounds it but of which it is not administratively a part, on the other hand. If the federal city of Moscow and the Moscow oblast are two distinct entities, in what framework and in what way can the urban and metropolitan areas of Moscow develop if they are by essence bi-regional? What kind of interactions does the Russian federalism allow between these two subjects? Are bi-regional governance instruments emerging with the "right scope" and "right competencies," i.e., on the scale of the metropolis and commensurate with the challenges faced by the vast macro-region of Moscow? What urban morphologies are emerging as a result of the consensual and/or conflictual relations between the two entities? What territorial reconfigurations can be observed? What issues does the emergence of such a metropolis raise in the fragile Russian economic and demographic balance? In other words, how can a global metropolis be fashioned in a context of a regional and fragmented governance in the era of post-Soviet Russian federalism? It turns a series of "coveted developments" and "disputed territories" into "local geopolitical laboratories". They are the targets of hoarding strategies by various stakeholders who often practice misappropriation and embezzlement to win highly lucrative tenders. The thesis then analyses the appointment by president Dmitri Medvedev in 2010 of Sergey Sobyanin as mayor of Moscow, as the "return of the federal government" to Moscow. This appointment sets in motion the creation of a world city on two main fronts: Greater Moscow, which aims to provide the agglomeration with a system of "good governance" in terms of transport, and New Moscow, which aims to provide the capital with the territorial reserves necessary for its "good development". To synthetize, the dissertation contributes to urban geography and local geopolitics by studying urban governance, making Moscow an original case study to illustrate the metropolitan processes of political and territorial reconfigurations many cities are subjected to. It sheds light on the mechanisms that govern the Moscow metropolitan fabric and highlights the systemic limits and malfunctions inherent to Russian federalism in this area.
Fichier non déposé

Dates et versions

tel-04250351 , version 1 (19-10-2023)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : tel-04250351 , version 1

Citer

Vladimir Pawlotsky. LA FABRIQUE METROPOLITAINE DU GRAND MOSCOU : Géopolitique locale de l’agglomération-capitale dans le système fédéral russe. Géographie. IFG-LAB - Centre de recherches et d'analyses géopolitiques, 2022. Français. ⟨NNT : ⟩. ⟨tel-04250351⟩
15 Consultations
0 Téléchargements

Partager

Gmail Facebook X LinkedIn More