At the RE-CITY Final Conference in Kaiserslautern in March 2022, Elena Batunova presented a paper, "The institutional context for residential heritage management in Russian shrinking cities," as a part of the results of the "Institutional practices" subproject.
The paper explored the institutional context for residential heritage management in shrinking Russian cities, focusing on the institutional settings in areas relevant to residential heritage management, such as urban planning, housing, and monuments protection.
Although urban growth remains one of the most challenging issues for contemporary urban planning and policies, the reality of urban and regional shrinkage is raising new issues in decision-making. Shrinking cities already number in the thousands globally; in some countries like Russia, shrinking cities make up a majority. In shrinkage conditions, valuable residential heritage is mainly discussed from two points of view: the difficulties of preserving under resource constraints and the opportunities heritage can create for cities' regeneration and tourism development. However, the residential heritage management in post-socialist Russia raises some additional questions related to the contradictory and changing values of housing and protected heritage in shrinking cities. When the urban community declines in a shrinking city, values associated with the existing heritage are always defined within a cultural context change. How can heritage and housing values be redefined in a shrinking city? How do we fulfill contradictory requirements associated with housing and listed monuments to be protected?
Authors: Elena Batunova, Albina Davletshina & Carola Neugebauer