Monotown: Urban Dreams Brutal Imperatives Excerpt

Urban Dreams Brutal Imperatives Clayton Strange

Published by Applied Research and Design, San Francisco Publisher: Gordon Goff www.appliedresearchanddesign.com info@appliedresearchanddesign.com Author: Clayton Strange Editing: Clayton Strange Production: Clayton Strange Proofreading /Text Editing: Patricia English Graphic Design: Station Design Director: Nicholas Rock Designer: Karla Ferrara

The authors have made every reasonable effort to correctly acknowledge the credits of images used in the volume. It is nonetheless possible that some attributions may have been omitted or are partially incorrect, in which case the author will add any additional credits in subsequent editions.

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This work was made possible thanks to: The 2015 Druker Traveling Fellowship through the Bertram A. and Ronald M. Druker Charitable Foundation.

Harvard Graduate School of Design

You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

Copyright Š Clayton Strange 2019 Research conducted at Harvard Graduate School of Design 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 First Edition ISBN: 978-1-939621-57-3

CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

VII

PREFACE

XI

INTRODUCTION

001

PART 1: 012 PRELIMINARY FRAMEWORKS

PART 2: MONOTOWNS

064

Defining the Monotown

01 Novotroitsk

072

A New Steel Base in the Urals

080

015

015 Gradoobrazuyushcheye Predpriyatiye: The Enterprise that has Created the Town Common Threads

020

Urban Dreams Brutal Imperatives

026

The Urban Network and Culture of Territory: Russia’s Long Struggle with Geography

026

A Growing Impetus for “Self-Colonization” Land and Housing Under the New Economic Policy 1921–1928

The Great Urals Plan

082

A 20–Year Operation

090

The Evolving Form of the Soviet Monotown

094

Post-Soviet Novotroitsk and the Project of Autonomy

104

02 Yurga

114

030

Defense Industry and a New Post-Industrial Project

124

037

Planned Town, Organic Network: Defense Industrialization of a Siberian Village

126

New Frameworks for the Post-Soviet Monotown

130

A New Project of Adaptation

136

039 New Architectural Types: Clubs, Communes, and Factories as Social Condensers Clubs and a New Monumental Imagery

040

Communal Houses

045

Remaking the City to Remaking the Territory

046

Brutal Imperatives

048

Urban Dreams

052

The Monotown

056

03 Mezhdurechensk

148

Territorial Production of the Kuznetsk Basin

156

158 Regionalism and the Territorial Production Complex Coal as a Generative Landscape

167

Mountains, Materials, and a Monotown

171

Spaces of Transition, Supra-Urban Infrastructures

177

04 Krasnokamensk

186

Monotown in the Valley of Death

196

Autonomy and Extra– territoriality: Monotowns of Northeast Asia

198

Borderland: A Landscape Palimpsest

199

Uranium and Its Monotown: Another National Imperative

202

An Ideal Town for Recent Graduates

206

Territory and Beyond

210

PART 3: TRANSLATIONS

222

05 Baiyin

230

08 Panzhihua

348

Developing the West: Soviet Industrial Urbanization in China

236

Building a Landscape of Metal Along the Great Third Front

354

A Framework for Industrialization

239

An Impregnable Cloud-Ringed Fortress

356

A New Society in Place of the Old

242

The Great Third Front

360

245

Chimeric Adaptations: Extreme Planning Along the Jinsha River

362

Haojiachuan and the Loess Plateau

From Farms to Factories and Back Again: Post-1978 Development

371

Left Behind

376

Spatial and Institutional 248 Frameworks: Planning Baiyin Baiyin’s Plans and the Form of the City

255

Old Baiyin

261

New Baiyin

264

06 Bhilai

272

A Socialist Industrial Utopia in India

280

Soviet Influence in the Indian Planning Apparatus

284

An Amalgam of 286 Infrastructures, Ideologies, and Agendas Industry as a Modernist Project

294

Legacy and Emerging Challenges

304

07 Bokaro

312

Contesting the Developmental Landscape

318

Development of the Damodar Valley

320

Democracy, Socialism, and Indian Expertise

323

New Township Strategies

328

Growth, Transformation, and Shifting Institutional Priorities

337

EPILOGUE: A NEW 380 PROJECT OF REINVENTION Framing the Hinterland

380

Nowhere to Go

382

A Common Project

384

NOTES

388

BIBLIOGRAPHY

408

MONOTOWN: URBAN DREAMS BRUTAL IMPERATIVES

“Work, Build, and Don’t Whine” —Title of an illustration by Aleksandr Deineka, 1930

vi

Acknowledgments

Over the past several years, a vast number of people and institutions have helped bring this volume to completion. I begin by expressing my deepest gratitude to the Bertram A. and Ronald M. Druker Charitable Foundation for sponsoring the project through the Druker Traveling Fellowship at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD). In addition, I owe a large debt of gratitude for the institutional support provided by the GSD, which proved indispensable during the extensive travel undertaken to produce this volume. I am grateful to the faculty members of the Department of Urban Planning and Design, who have been a constant source of inspiration as the research has taken shape. In particular, my deep respect and appreciation goes to Felipe Correa for his support, mentorship, and guidance over several years of teaching, writing, drawing, and conducting research at Harvard. I thank Rahul Mehrotra for his advice and support, which were vital during my work in India. For my trip to Moscow, I am similarly indebted to Irina Gorstein for connecting me with those who could help with the research. Finally, I would be remiss not to express my appreciation for casual discussions on the project with numerous friends and colleagues at Harvard over the past several years.

Beyond the Harvard community, there are many individuals to thank between Moscow and Kolkata without whom the project would not have been possible.

An enormous debt is owed to Anna Medleva for her tireless support of my efforts in Moscow by helping to organize travel and by providing me the opportunity to discuss the project with a wide range of professionals and institutions.

Thank you to Andrey Bokov and the Union of Architects of Russia for endorsing the project, and thank you to other members of the Moscow design community with whom I enjoyed valuable discussions. I would also like to acknowledge Greta Uehling for her help, and extend a very special thank you to Alexander Tkachinskiy for serving as guide and translator from Moscow to Krasnokamensk.

Acknowledgments

MONOTOWN: URBAN DREAMS BRUTAL IMPERATIVES viii

The administration of Novotroitsk deserves a special mention for its generous support of the project. Specifically, I thank Mayor Yuri Araskin for receiving me, and express my gratitude to Julia Kirov and the many other municipal employees for their help.

Special thanks are owed to local history museum staff members in Novotroitsk, Yurga, and Mezhdurechensk. Specifically, I thank directors Irina Fursova, Nina Dorofeeva, and Tatyana Ananyina for meeting with me, granting me access to archival materials, and discussing with me at length the histories of their towns. Similarly, I would like to acknowledge Inna Yanenko and Gennady Semenovich for their generous help in acquiring materials for Krasnokamensk.

For my travels in China, a special debt of gratitude is owed to my friend and colleague Long Zuo for his tireless, multivalent efforts on my behalf, especially during my visits to Baiyin and Panzhihua. Thank you to Jinming Zhao, former head of the City Construction Bureau for Gansu Province, for agreeing to meet with me and discuss his many perspectives on planning in Baiyin. A special debt of gratitude is owed to Liao Bingying of Panzhihua University School of Civil Engineering and Architecture for meeting with me during my visit and for her continued support of the project.

For my travels in India, a great debt is owed to Andrew W. K. Langstieh for generously extending the logistical support and hospitality of the Damodar Valley Corporation (DVC) to me during my research efforts in Jharkhand and West Bengal. To this end, I would like to acknowledge the efforts of the DVC staff members, and especially those of Anjan Kumar Dey, in supporting my trip.

Another great debt is owed to the Steel Authority of India Limited (SAIL) for hosting me and for generously granting me access to facilities and archival materials during my visits to Bhilai and Bokaro. In particular, I thank Sanjay Tewary for his key role in building my relationship with SAIL and for sharing his many insights into the Bokaro Steel Plant and township. Furthermore, access to Bokaro’s archival materials would not have been possible without the help of Dipankar Das, whose knowledge of the town’s design and planning history has been a great asset.

For my trip to Bhilai, I am indebted to Vijay Mairal for his generous hospitality and for facilitating my access to SAIL’s archival materials. I thank Mukul Jagdev for sharing his expertise and helping me explore the township’s architecture and current projects.

Finally, I express my appreciation to Joy Sen of the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur for his enthusiasm and hospitality, for sharing his knowledge of Bhilai and Bokaro, and for facilitating my travels in India. To this end, a special mention goes to Sunny Bansal for his friendship and logistical support.

In addition, a number of individuals provided important help with respect to research and production of the book. A great debt is owed to Felipe Correa and Eve Blau for reading and providing feedback on the manuscript. Zhuo Pang deserves a special mention for her help in developing graphic materials for Baiyin and Panzhihua. Tianhui Ho also deserves special mention for his help in translating written materials for Baiyin. Further, I thank Sergey Kostenko for his skillful assistance in acquiring hard-to-find graphic materials for the Russian case studies. Casual assistance offered by my friends and colleagues over the course of the production process has also been a boon and bears acknowledgment: thank you to Maxime Faure, Renia Kagkou, Teddy Kofman, Yi Li, and Liang Wang.

Finally, the support of my family has made all the difference. In particular, my greatest appreciation goes to Kyung-Ha Lee for her constant love, support, and enthusiasm over several years of research, drawing, writing, and travel across the hinterlands of Eurasia.

Acknowledgments

MONOTOWN: URBAN DREAMS BRUTAL IMPERATIVES

x

Preface Felipe Correa

The fast-paced industrialization processes of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries set forth an unprecedented collection of new cities associated with sites of industrial production. From the metallurgic towns along the Ruhr Valley in Germany to the nitrate extraction cities in the Chilean Atacama Desert, the pairing of extractive enterprises with an ex novo settlement is a spatial model that has inscribed towns and cities across all corners of the Earth. Defined differently, based on geography, industry, use, and time period (industrial town, company town, resource extraction town, etc.), industry-affiliated ex novo towns became, throughout the last century, important epicenters of architectural experimentation. Conceived as a microcosm of society, these settlements served as urban laboratories where new lifestyles and forms of social exchange could be imagined and tested. With forms reminiscent of ideal cities and guided by utopian texts—from Scamozzi’s military cities of the Renaissance to Robert Owen’s A New Vision of Society—industrial towns, across the globe, became epicenters of experimentation on how societies could be planned, inscribed, and administered.

Preface

MONOTOWN: URBAN DREAMS BRUTAL IMPERATIVES

Monotown: Urban Dreams Brutal Imperatives builds on the expansive legacy of the industry-affiliated town and presents a comprehensive documentation and analysis of the systematic deployment of mono-industry settlements implemented during the Soviet era. In doing so, the book not only fills an important gap in the historiography of the ex novo town, but also introduces the reader to an in-depth examination of the many town planning models that shaped a significant area of formerly Soviet territory. Through archival material, photography, and original drawings, the book cleverly weaves together the architectural with the geographic, bringing to the forefront the specific spatial and material systems that shaped the towns, while also showcasing their aggregate impact when implemented at a national scale. Strange’s written and visual narratives successfully recast the monotown in the context of a more expansive global history.

Eight carefully selected case-study towns are presented in the book, and these are tied together by a series of narratives that thread across each of the chapters. Among these threads, three seem to stand out. One, is the careful bridging across multiple scales of investigation, ranging from the singular building to the regional and territorial plan. From detailed tables of standard building types to regional landscape systems, the material shows clear links between the architectural and the geographic, presenting the monumental scale of many of these plans as they are systematically inscribed across the continent, bypassing national borders. Two, is the use of time and the diachronic nature of the text and images. Strange places a strong emphasis on showing the reader not only the formal vision for each town, but also its systemic evolution over time. In doing so, he presents a holistic, temporal cross-section of each project, carefully pairing dreamy design ideals with the imperatives and weight of implementation.

This provides the reader with a longue-durée view of the physical and political project that produced the monotown. Three, is the importance of travel as an integral part of research. A significant portion of the material documented in this book is accessible only by in situ experiences in China, India, and Russia: journeys that gave the author access to local narratives and previously unpublished archival material. As databases and geospatial information systems continue to gain prominence in urban research, this book reminds us of the essential role played by travel and firsthand observation in helping us translate information into knowledge.

Presented as a “post-industrial project of reinvention,” the epilogue sheds light on the future of these towns as the economic base and political strictures that shaped them continue to dissolve. In doing so, Clayton Strange presents a holistic overview of the major pressures that are currently at play in these towns—conservation, economic development, privatization, urban–rural divide, etc.—and argues for a new mindset that can reinvent single-industry towns as pluralistic settlements, suggesting new urban models that might help these towns outlive the industries that originated them. Ultimately, the volume becomes the first comprehensive history of the Soviet monotown, and furthermore, it provides a blueprint for reimagining its future.

Felipe Correa Vincent and Eleanor Shea Professor Chair of the Department of Architecture University of Virginia School of Architecture

xii

Preface

MONOTOWN: URBAN DREAMS BRUTAL IMPERATIVES

“Siberia sleeps, wearing a white brocade of snows. Quietly the white swell of the fields sways, the bound tundra freezes, moans an even moan of the taiga. But on New Year’s Eve, the quiet dreams of Siberia break off and rebellious light dreams rush from ocean to ocean, from the Urals to the Bering Sea. The Siberian frosts are anxious and cruel. In the vast plains, giant hammers rustle and tremble on the heights of the heights of the mountains. Build, build!”

—Aleksei Gastev, excerpt from Express: A Siberian Fantasy, 19161

“This vast region has played a special role throughout Russia’s history and today our country can move forward successfully only if we ensure this region’s dynamic development.”

—Vladimir Putin, Siberian Times, December 1, 20122

Introduction

During the 1920s and 1930s, the monotown, or monogorod, emerged as a distinctive sociopolitical project of urbanization driven by the teleological establishment of industrial enterprises across remote parts of the Siberian hinterland.

Embodied succinctly by the commonly used phrase gradoobrazuyushcheye predpriyatiye, or “the enterprise that has created the town,” monotown development entailed the relocation of vast populations, requiring services, housing, and social and physical infrastructure, all linked to a given town’s productive apparatus. Today, having outlasted the political and economic systems that made them viable, many have become shrinking towns with graying populations, and obsolete enterprises, even as they are subjected to considerable national investment and commanded to grow in order to catalyze their respective regions. In 1999, the Russian Ministry of the Economy carried out a study entitled “Monotowns and Core Enterprises” in which no fewer than 467 cities and 332 smaller towns were classified as monotowns, accounting for the livelihoods of no less than 25 million people and 30 percent of Russia’s industrial output.3 While more recent reports scaled back these figures and refined notions of what exactly constituted a monotown, the scale of the problem remains substantial— the future of these towns both questionable and pressing.

Introduction

MONOTOWN: URBAN DREAMS BRUTAL IMPERATIVES 2

Like many aspects of Soviet architecture and urbanism during the 1920s and 1930s, monotowns were part and parcel of broad visions for the USSR’s socialist urban future, emerging through a desire to reshape both geography and society through architecture and planning. At the same time, monotowns were also products of the national directive for rapid industrialization during the USSR’s first five-year plan. Concern that the advanced nations of Western Europe posed a growing military threat catalyzed the allocation of national resources into the development of new industrial bases beyond the bounds of European Russia, in places safely beyond the range of German bombers. The development of industrial bases in Siberia and the Far East embodied a project of colonization bequeathed to the new regime by the deceased Russian Empire and its earlier territorial conquests. The resulting communities built upon earlier military-style settlement practices, combined with new technologies, the socio-cultural economic designs of Marxism, and bucolic attitudes toward the cityscape that had emerged in Western Europe in reaction to the mass industrialization of the nineteenth century. New aggregations emerged in which every aspect of social life was part of a plan, and in which that social life was conceived of as an extension of a particular community’s productive apparatus.

Rapid industrialization entailed both resource extraction and territorial structuring: thus, the monotown became the instrument through which the “socialist productive community” was founded in remote geographies by national mechanisms, carrying out the territorial obligations imposed by the notion of territory itself, planning and design appropriating the agency even to decide where population ought to be located. Like plans for electrification, the monotown was also seen as an instrument for flattening national space, not just through redistributing population, but through its role as an entrepôt, providing social amenities both for those living in the town itself and for those in surrounding regions. Under the complex social, economic, and political conditions implemented by the Soviet regime, the monotown emerged as an effective instrument for settling remote territory; shifting populations to align with national directives for regional economic planning; exploiting Siberia’s vast natural resources; and building a modern, industrialized, socialist society. The monotown embodied the flawed, brutal, and ultimately temporary realization of urban dreams articulated by architects and economic planners of the 1920s and 1930s.

In spite of the new regime’s prewar dependence on technology transfer from the Unites States and Western Europe, the USSR’s postwar success in achieving rapid industrialization and national development made it an alternative for so-called Third World countries that wanted to industrialize their own economies but to whom following in the footsteps of their former colonial masters was an anathema. Nations such as China and India, which had large hinterlands that were either barren and deserted or socioeconomically undeveloped, found themselves confronted with many of the same issues as the USSR of the 1920s and 1930s. Thus, the unique bundle of concerns that bound the project of industrialization to socialism and Soviet town-forming practices soon transcended the national and became a channel for transferring technology, expertise, investment, and ideology into contested postcolonial geographies. The construction of these new towns, how they were planned, and what they symbolized became important points of engagement between competing ideologies and national interests. Since neither Soviet models nor the proposals of their Euro-American competitors could be transferred in pristine condition onto the complex milieu of indigenous precedents and inherited colonial constructs characterizing their new alien geographies, the hybrid agglomerations that resulted took form through overlapping social, economic, and political forces. In these other contexts, too, the path to modernity and socialism vis-à-vis industrialization carried its own dreamy visions of a bucolic urban future along with a brutality of transition that, if not as coercive as that under Stalin, was deeper in breadth due to its pace and the comparatively radical transformations it imposed on postcolonial

societies. Through these projects, the concerns that gave form to settlements around remotely located industrial enterprises in Russia were spread far and wide over diverse geographies and cultures, transcending definition as a simple phenomenon of national urbanization. In short, the monotown in its complex instantiations emerged as a model for geographical, political, economic, social, and territorial structuring par excellence.

But the late twentieth century saw a dramatic shift away from many of the concerns embodied by the monotown toward a renewed ethos of centralization, investment, and capital accumulation in a few major cities. Characteristics reviled by many twentieth-century models of urbanization such as density, diversity, and unstructured social exchange gained a new lease on life, often seen as drivers of innovation. For monotowns, the sudden demise, or gradual erosion of the economic and political systems that originally shaped them, posed new, formidable challenges. The project of the monotown shifted from one of ongoing expansion to one of rectifying past mistakes and adapting yesterday’s city to meet the needs of the twenty-first century. Dependent as they were on the operations of a single enterprise or chain of interrelated enterprises and the social amenities they provided for workers, sudden exposure to the vagaries of international markets posed drastic changes to the economic and social life of many monotowns. The 1990s were marked by periods of tumultuous restructuring, while the early 2000s brought a period of expansion due to a boom in commodity prices. However, the economic crisis of the late 2000s brought an abrupt end to this period and triggered a prolonged crisis, highlighting the vulnerability of towns dependent on a single industry. The word “monotown” became synonymous with economic decay. These events, along with more reports on monotowns issued by the governments of multiple post-Soviet states, prompted a flurry of post-crisis coverage in the popular media that typically took an economic or social focus. Institutional publications, such as a 2010 Russian economic report by the World Bank in Russia, almost always focus on the “problem of the monotown” from an economic and political angle. In 2010, the Russian federal budget included aid for the economic diversification of 27 monotowns, even while admitting that this would not be enough to solve certain fundamental problems.4 While the need to adapt monotowns has received significant attention from both the Russian government and various institutions, the assumption that their problems can be solved simply through the proper allocation of investment may require further scrutiny. Although concrete answers remain elusive, it is clear that a more concerted, transnational, and comparative examination of specific case studies and their common struggles is merited.

Existing literature on the monotown and its associated projects of national development is extensive, if often siloed. The 1960s and 1970s saw a wave of interest in the revolutionary ideas embodied by developments in design and planning in the Soviet Union during the first decades following the 1917 revolution. Work produced on the subject during this period tended to reflect either the lived experiences of scholars fleeing the mechanisms of a coercive, violent, totalitarian state or took the form of dispassionate, matter-of-fact writings outlining the work of the Constructivists and, later, Stalinist planners. The latter was often supported by extensive literature outlining technical standards for the design and construction of everything from housing to the siting and design of factories, to national schemes for the distribution of cities. In short, repressive measures carried out by the Soviet government notwithstanding, the USSR’s achievements seemed impressive, and history had not yet seemingly rendered judgment on the sphere of practices encompassing planning and design themselves. After 1991, a new wave of literature emerged that sought to make sense of what had happened, but soon became rather more polemical.

One of the most salient among these with respect to monotowns is the 2003 publication The Siberian Curse: How Communist Planners Left Russia Out in the Cold in which Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy argue that patterns of urbaniza-

Introduction

MONOTOWN: URBAN DREAMS BRUTAL IMPERATIVES 4

tion in the Soviet Union beginning in the 1930s left contemporary Russia with an intractable problem—a system of physical and social infrastructure that is essentially and irrevocably misplaced. They argue against centralized spatial and economic planning, pointing out that modern economies are based upon the intensity of exchange and the mobility of factors of production—elements hopelessly compromised by the schemes for dispersed urbanization that shape contemporary Siberia. Yet, ongoing declarations and financial commitments made by the Russian government for the continued development of Siberia preclude any far-fetched notion that monotowns will be abandoned or somehow relocated.5 As it happens, plans are under way to expand many strategically significant agglomerations’ roles as growth poles for their respective regions. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s 2012 reassertion that the region’s development constitutes a historic national imperative made the obligation to expand quite clear, and significant investment continues to pour into the promotion of small business growth and the construction of new infrastructure.6 For towns with economies dependent on the operations of a single, often struggling industry, these assertions translate into an imperative for transformation.

More recent publications have taken a concerted interest in the obstacles to reform, perhaps most comprehensive of which is Stephen J. Collier’s 2011 book, Post-Soviet Social: Neoliberalism, Social Modernity, Biopolitics, which examines, at length, the diverse and complex aspects of planning, architecture, and society that emerged during the early twentieth century, and how they translated into post-Soviet circumstances.7 Collier’s work, along with Stephen Crowley’s 2015 article in Post-Soviet Affairs, “Monotowns and the Political Economy of Industrial Restructuring in Russia,” provide valuable sociopolitical insights into the forces that shaped Soviet industrial urbanization.8 But aside from brief examinations of the influences on the Soviet circumstance of models derived from Western Europe, the postindustrial condition of the monotown is treated as a distinct phenomenon of Russia and the other post-Soviet republics. There have been insightful international comparisons made through the lens of individual workplace institutions, such as the 1997 volume Danwei: The Changing Chinese Workplace in Historical and Comparative Perspective, edited by Xiaobo Lu and Elizabeth J. Perry, which explores the social, spatial, and disciplinary similarities between the danwei and the operations of Soviet state-owned enterprises.9 Expanding the scope, there are many informative works on regional planning schemes that bear similarity to the concerns behind Soviet developments of the 1930s. One such work is Barry Naughton’s The Third Front: Defense Industrialization in the Chinese Interior, which details China’s massive program of investment in its remote Southwest between 1964 and 1971.10 David Ekbladh’s 2002 article “‘Mr. TVA’: Grass-Roots Development, David Lilienthal, and the Rise and Fall of the Tennessee Valley Authority as a Symbol for U.S. Overseas Development, 1933–1973” also stands out, examining the TVA as an ideologically embedded developmental framework and its translation into foreign contexts.

But Ekbladh’s piece takes a social and diplomatic angle rather than one of urban and regional analysis.11 Other comparative analyses also tend to be more economic or political in their focus, such as Santosh Mehrotra’s 1990 work, India and the Soviet Union: Trade and Technology Transfer.12 But few studies aspire to traverse scales and disciplines, tying large-scale regional developments to their details in order to build comparisons between the specific projects they produced. Felipe Correa’s more recent Beyond the City: Resource Extraction Urbanism in South America is one such example, focusing on various projects for the development and transnational integration of the South American hinterland.13 Monotown: Urban Dreams Brutal Imperatives constructs a narrative around the transformation of the monotown over time and space, both through its translation across alien geographies and cultures and as a postindustrial project of reinvention. Eight case studies are examined, strewn across the remote

landscapes of contemporary Russia, China, and India, and are framed within the broad regional developmentalist projects of which they were considered details.

I argue that the cases included in this volume owe their existence to common sets of interests and the strategies employed to give these interests built form.

While each case is subjected to considerable national idiosyncratic forces, their similar origins bind the cases together into a coherent whole, at the same time condemning them to common postindustrial hardships that transcend national boundaries. As such, the study is both an incomplete inventory of salient cases and a platform for speculation about the future. Today’s growing politicization of the socioeconomic divide between large urban centers and national hinterlands has prompted a refocus of government energies, revisiting many of the concerns that occupied the minds of twentieth-century planners, architects, and political leaders. New projects for developing hinterland infrastructure and economies are upon us, with yesterday’s remote, single-industry towns at their center, framed as objects for reform and reinvention.

This book is organized into three parts, each describing a key aspect of the monotown in the post-Soviet republics and in an expanded context. Part 1 addresses the origins and definition of the monotown, examining the preoccupations of those who imagined the new socialist world and the development of industrial towns of a particular size and character across the vast Soviet territory. Part 2 explores the monotown as a national phenomenon through case studies in the Urals, the Kuznetsk Basin, and on the barren steppe of the Russian Far East. Constructed along the lines of standardized national town-forming mechanisms, the cases bear marked similarity as well as key differences, which make them unique. Through its specifics, each case serves as a fulcrum for discussions on important topics related to the development and legacy of monotowns at large, though the degree of interchangeability between the examples, too, is an important point, illustrating the standardized production and national character of Soviet hinterland development. Each of the examples can be read as a sort of essay in the craft of constructing the Soviet single-industry town: each perhaps an isolated description of the ideal model. The descriptions of the towns aspire to paint at least a partial picture of the overall narrative of national industrial development and urbanization in the USSR. The first two cases, Novotroitsk and Yurga, owe their origins to developments leading up to World War II, while Mezhdurechensk and Krasnokamensk emerged as postwar agglomerations. In Part 3, these discussions are extended to explore the largely overlooked legacy of the monotown as a model of urbanization that was translated onto remote geographies of China and India through Soviet-aided industrial development projects. How indigenous social institutions, spatial sensibilities, and politics shaped the transfer and deployment of Soviet models is central to these discussions. Baiyin and Bhilai demonstrate the initial translation into new national contexts, while Panzhihua and Bokaro examine their gradual assimilation.

Case studies in the post-Soviet context were selected to reflect notions of the socialist “ideal town size”—that is to say, towns that were not exceptionally large or small but that constituted projects of significant population and investment. Towns such as Magnitogorsk, Tolyatti, or Novokuznetsk are often discussed and have already been the subject of significant scholarship. But more importantly, one can hardly say that they represent conditions typical of monotowns across the former USSR. Neither could the case studies be very small. Many examples identified by the government of the Russian Federation as “monotowns,” while fitting the description of settlements that emerged from the construction of a single enterprise, are little more than villages and did not receive the kind of national investment characterizing many of their larger counterparts. Rather, the process of selection was guided by a desire to identify more constitutive cases—settlements in the range of 50,000 to 150,000 inhabitants that had clearly been the subject of significant national investment,

Introduction

MONOTOWN: URBAN DREAMS BRUTAL IMPERATIVES 6

construction, and planning efforts. Case studies in China and India tend to be somewhat larger and have fewer peers, though perhaps of similar stature within their respective national urban hierarchies.

As of this writing, many strategies have been employed in the name of adapting monotowns and their international counterparts, with some efforts beginning as early as the 1980s. But whether or not these projects have achieved their goals remains a matter of some doubt. Thus far, the project of reinvention remains one of considerable uncertainty, relying upon laundry lists of strategies outlined by organizations such as the World Bank or other consultants. It is not the goal of this book to suggest that there is, or could be, a universal answer to the common problems encountered by such towns. Indeed, solutions proposed for each case tend to be entangled in procedures and sensibilities embedded in their national circumstances. Perhaps the current predisposition toward adopting nationwide strategies for their transformation bears some responsibility for monotowns’ ongoing struggles, even as those same national imperatives compel ongoing efforts to reinvent them. It is the aspiration of this volume to promote a more interdisciplinary and international dialogue about the future of such settlements. Although the transnational case studies discussed in the following pages can at times seem remarkably different, their planning was also concerned with many of the same ideas, and current schemes for their reinvention attempt to address many similar problems. By exploring the etymology of the monotown over time in this expanded field, the work aims at a broader yet more specific dialogue about its complex legacy and future. This book is dedicated to promoting a new narrative of reinvention for remote industrial towns that developed around a single industry or enterprise; to the workers who built and lived in them, voluntarily or otherwise; and to those who live there today.

Introduction

MONOTOWN: URBAN DREAMS BRUTAL IMPERATIVES above left: Sayansk (1970) (manufacturing, chemicals) bottom left: Zavolzhye (1947) (manufacturing, machine industry) above right: Tutaev (1973) (manufacturing, engines) bottom right: Vorkuta (1943) (extraction, coal)

8

Defining the Monotown

MONOTOWN: URBAN DREAMS BRUTAL IMPERATIVES above left: Krasnoturyinsk (1944) (manufacturing, non-ferrous metallurgy) bottom left: Osinniki (1938) (extraction, coal) above right: Trekhgorny (1955) (manufacturing, nuclear industry) bottom right: Tolyatti (1946) (manufacturing, machine

10

Defining the Monotown

MONOTOWN: URBAN DREAMS BRUTAL IMPERATIVES

01 Prelimi Framewo

12

inary orks 01

Novotroitsk

072

02

Yurga

114

03

Mezhdurechensk

148

04

Krasnokamensk

186

05

Baiyin

230

06 07

Bhilai Bokaro

272 312

08

Panzhihua

348

Defining the Monotown

MONOTOWN: URBAN DREAMS BRUTAL IMPERATIVES

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Defining the Monotown

GRADOOBRAZUYUSHCHEYE PREDPRIYATIYE: THE ENTERPRISE THAT HAS CREATED THE TOWN Perhaps the most common point of agreement among those writing on monotowns is the lack of any concrete definition for the term itself. “Monotown” is a translation of the Russian term “monogorod,” and both are essentially shortened versions of a term used by the government of the Russian Federation, “mono-profile town.” Simply put, a monotown is a town dominated by a single industry. A decree by the government of the Russian Federation in July of 2014 identified 313 such towns in Russia, categorizing them by their socioeconomic status. These ranged from relatively stable towns to those experiencing severe instability. Refining earlier efforts to identify, sort, and categorize, the new list was more rigorous in its criteria, and the number of towns was reduced. A mono-profile town had to exceed 3,000 inhabitants, the number of employees at the dominant enterprise had to exceed 20 percent of the total economically active population over the past five years, and the enterprise itself had to specialize in mining, manufacturing, or industrial processing.1 Although much speculation, scholarship, and journalism has emerged from this authoritative list, not to mention its more nebulous predecessors, it is debatable whether valuable comparisons can be made between a lumber-manufacturing settlement of 3,000 inhabitants and an automotive city of 700,000. In short, the urban constructs encompassed by the term “monotown” compel a more pluralistic definition.

Defining the Monotown

MONOTOWN: URBAN DREAMS BRUTAL IMPERATIVES View of a Phalanstère, from Jules Arnout, Excursions en Harmonie; Vue Générale d’un Phalanstère ou Village Sociétaire Organisé d’après la Théorie de Fourier (Paris, 1859).

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In fact, a variety of definitions are offered from an equally plentiful array of sources. The most basic of these is probably that given by the World Bank: “urban settlements with economic bases dominated by a single enterprise.”2 Other attempts shed a more telling light on the operational difficulties surrounding the potential transformation of such towns. As Ivashina and Ulyakina point out, enterprises and inhabitants of monotowns are often unable to justify the financial risk of new investment, precluding new projects that might otherwise grant monotowns a new lease on life.3 This definition would seem to suggest the necessity of special mechanisms for investing in the transformation of such towns.

Another common identifier draws parallels between monotowns and company towns, since, as with the latter, the enterprises forming the economic cores of monotowns do not emerge organically but are the raison d’etre for the towns themselves. Indeed, the phrase “gradoobrazuyushcheye predpriyatiye,” or “the enterprise that has created the town,” is often used to describe the mechanisms by which many monotowns were established. Similarly, Lappo posits that monotowns’ key identifying factor is the severely limited diversity of their economic and employment structures.4 More specific economic criteria can be found in the work of Pytkin and Zagoruyko, who identify five key factors that define monotowns. These include the presence of one or several similar enterprises serving a single, narrow segment of the industry market, while other enterprises serve the needs of the city or those living in it; the presence of a chain of technologically related enterprises operating in one final market; significant dependence of the city budget on the activities of one of the large enterprises; low diversity in the employment of the city’s population; and, finally, significant distance from other major population centers or a lack of developed infrastructure linking the town to the outside world.5 More visceral notions of the environments common to monotowns are also available. With the monotown’s debut into popular culture during the 2008 economic crisis, numerous articles began to appear in the media, painting a stark picture for the general public. In 2008, an article released by the Institute of Regional Policy entitled “The Monogorods of Russia, How to Survive the Crisis?”6 included a list of more than 400 towns and claimed that they constituted 25 percent of the population of Russia and 40 percent of its GDP. More titles followed, including “Darkness on the Edge of Monotown” (The New York Times, 2009),7 “Russia Faces Collapse of ‘Monotowns’” (Forbes, 2009),8 “Russia’s ‘Monotowns’ Time Bomb” (Russian Outlook, 2009),9 “Rise in Jobless Fuels Fears of Return to ’98” (The Moscow News, 2009),10 “Russia: One Big Detroit” (Newsweek, 2013),11 “Russia’s Monotowns Face Imminent Collapse” (Financial Times, 2016),12 and “Most Russian Monotown Residents Say Economic Situation Unbearable” (The Moscow Times, 2016).13 Through these titles, the term “monotown” acquired a problematizing function that went beyond employment figures. “Monotown” became emblematic of the postindustrial condition and was compared to examples as diverse as Pittsburgh, Detroit, and the Ruhr Valley. But beyond conjuring a certain kind of postindustrial imagery, the utility of these comparisons is debatable, as they tend to mask some of the most salient aspects of the monotown. In short, it is not enough to claim monotown status for a particular settlement simply based upon its morphology or how it came to be. Rather, a monotown is, by definition, experiencing or at risk of experiencing profound socioeconomic difficulties.

Defining the Monotown

MONOTOWN: URBAN DREAMS BRUTAL IMPERATIVES left: “Avtozavod,” plans, sections, elevations, perspectives from OSA’s competition proposal, 1930.

From Sovremennaya Arkhitektura. Courtesy of Fine Arts Library, Harvard University. above right: Perspective of the winning Avtozavod proposal by the Moscow Higher Technical Institute, 1930. below right: Construction of Avtozavod worker housing, 1930.

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Beyond economic criteria, the single most obvious, yet unexamined, assumption about the monotown is that it is a single-industry town located within the territories of Russia or the other former Soviet Republics. A variety of accounts outline the role of Marxism and Taylorism as dominant ideologies, as well as their role in establishing new assemblages of authority and notions of modernism along with a backdrop of geographic factors that were, if not completely unique to the USSR, at least novel in their combination during the 1920s and 1930s.

These and other factors formed the palimpsest of the monotown, itself both an artifact of these factors and an instrument through which they were deployed across geographies, territories, and nations. While this most basic association with the territory of the USSR is both important and seemingly obvious, it also obscures the fundamental role of the monotown as a model that was translated into other contexts as a vehicle for the transmission of technology and socialist space.

In an effort to emancipate the subject matter from the territorial and geographic constraints placed upon it by existing scholarship, this investigation eschews the task of parsing which settlements ought to be termed “monotowns� and which should not. Rather, the study concerns itself with examining towns in which thematic elements common to monotowns come together to form points of concentration and synergy, transformed by national contexts and the social and physical constructs they encountered in the process. Each of the case studies provides a different take on the modulation of these themes, exhibiting the roles that national, geographic, and cultural contexts play in translating ideas and strategies that originated in the Soviet context.

Defining the Monotown

MONOTOWN: URBAN DREAMS BRUTAL IMPERATIVES 20

COMMON THREADS Building and expanding upon definitions given by other authors, there are a number of salient aspects to monotowns that bear mentioning. Most fundamental, of course, is the domination of the town’s economic and social life by a single enterprise or by a collection of enterprises focused on a single industry. Monotowns were planned for the explicit purpose of housing and providing social services and support for industrial workers employed at a given enterprise. In many cases, the process of constructing the enterprise actually began prior to the establishment of housing and other institutions associated with the living areas of the town, which were often constructed by the industrial workers themselves.

It was also not uncommon for monotowns in the USSR to be constructed on the sites of existing villages in order to take advantage of existing transportation networks. In such cases, the scale and character of the new industrial settlements were so unlike what had come before that any trace of prior habitation was rendered almost inconsequential.

One of the basic assumptions intrinsic to the construct of the monotown is that labor can and should be relocated to the site of industrial production, which itself ought to be located according to rational economic, logistical, and sometimes strategic criteria. This aspect stands in contrast to common practice where market forces and the movement of population are regarded as governing economic laws around which planning is obliged to operate: in brief, industry is sited according to the availability of labor rather than the other way around.

Coercive measures of varying severity were often employed in order to relocate sizable populations to the sites where new enterprises would be built in the Soviet Union and in similar contexts. In this way, monotowns and their associated infrastructure often operate as instruments for regional development in remote locales where the environment is unusually severe or barren, precluding human settlement of any serious scale through other means. Associated rationales for settling such regions range from the intention to rectify the inequalities between developed areas and the hinterland, to settling uninhabited lands as part of a project for legitimizing territorial claims, to relocating industry to inaccessible locales out of perceived military necessity. As such, the monotown is explicitly a tool for the establishment of new population centers of a permanent nature—an aspect inevitably problematizing the town through the assumption that its enterprise must continue to operate, uninterrupted, irrespective of the town’s remoteness, technological changes, or the exhaustion of resources to be extracted. The same governments that established monotowns, or those inheriting them, are seldom willing to entertain the notion of their abandonment.

Company towns are often pointed out as a useful analogue in understanding the organization of monotowns. Indeed, there are important parallels to be drawn with regard to labor discipline, planning, the close integration of work and private life, and the omnipresence of industrial ownership and management.

During the nineteenth century, the ideas of utopian socialists such as Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, and others were influential both in Imperial Russia and the development of company towns in the West. Fourier’s ideas were particularly popular. His vision for a phalanstery that would house 1,600 people satisfied peasant notions of community, along with the monumental sensibilities popular among the intelligentsia. The phalanstery envisioned a community in which meals, work, and recreation were collectively organized.14 At their peak, company towns in the United States alone numbered in the thousands, testing and elaborating upon ideas established by nineteenth-century philosophers and industrialists. In fact, some of the first new factory towns established in the USSR built upon assembly line strategies and modes of industrial discipline derived from companies in Europe and the United States. One notable example was the town of Avtozavod, which was constructed in the early 1930s in order to manufacture Ford vehicles. It was a Ford facility in all but name, and embodied

above: View of the Cité Industrielle’s industrial areas with dam visible in background, 1917.

From Tony Garnier: Une Cité Industrielle (New York, 1990).

Courtesy of Frances Loeb Library, Harvard Graduate School of Design. below: Plan of the Cité Industrielle, 1917. From Tony Garnier: Une Cité Industrielle (New York, 1990). Courtesy of Frances Loeb Library, Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Defining the Monotown

MONOTOWN: URBAN DREAMS BRUTAL IMPERATIVES 22

Fordist notions of workplace authority that empowered factory managers and political leaders—characteristics that would aid the gradual Stalinist consolidation of power.15 Indeed, there are many parallels to be found between the company town and the monotown, and the two are by no means mutually exclusive. Oliver Dinius and Angela Vergara outline a series of points germane to discussions on company towns, which might just as easily describe the circumstances of monotowns, key among which is “the combination of a single dominant industry with extensive company control over the daily life of a town.”16 They go on to discuss “designers’ hope that shaping the built environment in particular ways will allow them to further their political, economic, and cultural goals,” along with the three-dimensionalization of social thought and what they call “‘spatial engineering’—the deliberate manipulation of the landscape—for purposes of social engineering.”17 But the monotown is distinct by virtue of its status as a national construct carrying out national objectives and embodying national ideologies and visions for regional development and population distribution. Although the de facto role of the company town in territorial structuring is well documented,18 the monotown’s role as such is an explicit aspect of the planning process. Furthermore, given their role in shifting populations to undeveloped, inhospitable territories, ongoing government interest in maintaining monotowns situates remoteness as a key problematic. Abandonment is not typically seen as a viable option, and government subsidies maintain city-forming enterprises that are no longer profitable.

One of the earliest visions for urbanizing the Russian territory through the construction of “Industrial Village(s) of the Future” can be found in Peter Kropotkin’s Fields, Factories, and Workshops: Or Industry Combined with Agriculture and Brain Work with Manual Work in which he discusses a network of small, egalitarian settlements and the development of Russian natural resources in order to replace imports from Western Europe.19 Expressing a clear interest in bringing the productive benefits of industrialization to the hinterland, he discusses “The scattering of industries over the country—so as to bring the factory amidst the fields, to make agriculture derive all those profits which it always finds in being combined with industry.”20 Tony Garnier’s 1917 proposal for a “Cité Industrielle” built upon these ideas, illustrating the proposition that the extraction of primary resources ought to be linked to notions of the public good. Garnier’s scheme also imbued the town with a bucolic, modernist imagery and prioritized industrial processes and environmental factors in determining the town’s morphology. Strongly influenced by the garden city movement, Garnier proposed a settlement for 35,000 that separated various uses but, most fundamentally, isolated living areas from industrial ones.21 Perhaps the earliest pair of schemes to embody many of the principles germane to the Soviet monotown is Claude-Nicolas Ledoux’s Royal Saltworks in Arc-et-Senans, France, and its idealized, unbuilt twin, the city of Chaux. These projects combined key ideas about structured communal life with a kind of industrial urbanism predating the steam-powered Industrial Revolution. The former was a state project for the production of a significant eighteenth-century commodity and was certainly envisioned as a social utopia. Ledoux imagined a society built on peaceful and harmonious relationships with nature. At the same time, the saltworks employed radial spatial strategies for social control, ensuring continuous supervision of workers. Perhaps most interesting, the project was sited based on rational, industrial logic. Rather than following standard practices wherein extraction sites were established at sources of salt, Ledoux located the project near timberlands that would serve as fuel for the saltworks.

The reasoning was that piping saltwater to the site would be far easier than moving the whole forest. Similarly, Ledoux chose a flat, empty field for the project in which the functional dictates of worker discipline and the flow and input of raw materials could remain primary drivers for design, unchallenged by negoti-

“Perspective View of the Forge” (above) and “Perspective View of the City of Chaux” (below), 1789. From Claude Nicolas Ledoux, L’architecture Considérée sous le Rapport de l’art, des Moeurs et de la Legislation (Paris, 1962). Courtesy of Special Collections, Fine Arts Library, Harvard University.

Defining the Monotown

MONOTOWN: URBAN DREAMS BRUTAL IMPERATIVES Poster demonstrating the deified status of industry as national ideology and the factory as a central, symbolic edifice, 1920s. Courtesy Duke University Libraries.

ating the vagaries of a complex site.22 Like the USSR’s monotowns, the saltworks also embodied interesting symbolic dynamics as the project of a regime—and even of an individual—with relatively unchecked power. On the one hand, the saltworks aspired to associate with a sort of “cosmic” authority through its formal reference to a sundial and through repeated references, made by Ledoux, relating the daily routines of workers to the procession of sunlight through the project.23 The semi-cosmic radiance of Marxist–Leninist ideology defining the form and organization of the monotown across the Soviet territory, marking the daily routines, attitudes, and practices of workers, might be seen as a parallel to Ledoux’s sunlight. In both cases, the cosmic symbolism of the towns gets tangled up in references to state authority. The saltworks literally belonged to the king, while the imagery and symbolism of the monotown’s spaces and architecture cannot help but reference the authority of Stalin. Looking specifically at the ideal city of Chaux, the architectural symbolism and urban imaginary conflating state power and cosmic forces is extended further as a language for the edifices of industrial production, bestowing a transcendental stature upon the production of salt. These links between authority, ideology, and urban form would play

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similar roles in Soviet society, granting industrial production a deified status as a cultural–aesthetic project, a potent analogue for national ideology and state authority, and a central rationale for founding new towns.

In this way, monotowns embodied both the national and the ideological, seen as both “socialist towns” and Soviet towns. With the proliferation of Soviet developmental models abroad, the governments of China and India layered notions of socialism embedded in the monotown with their own variations on nationalistic space. Monotowns and their counterparts abroad often carried notions of bucolic imagery in stubborn denial of landscapes and biomes they inherited by virtue of geography. Rather, the monotown transforms the place it is in through the construction of dams and the planting of thousands of trees. In each context, the monotown makes use of consistent national forms along with standardized urban plans and urban spatial tropes. Further, as an ideological construct tied to notions of developing territory, the monotown carries with it the imperative of rectifying so-called backwardness by bringing state-sponsored social amenities, such as education and health services, to the hinterland.

Similarly, the monotown serves didactic purposes, embodied in its most benign form, through the central mandate to produce a new socialist citizen and, more ominously, through the practice of exiling state enemies to far-flung locales to be re-educated.

Finally, it is important to note that monotowns were complete works of modern planning that took form through an amalgam of industrial-era strategies grounded in a desire to emancipate workers from the dirtiness and congestion of the nineteenth-century industrial city. In the USSR, these models were reinterpreted through the lens of Marxism and reframed as antidotes, not just to industrialization, but to the congestion associated with the accumulation of capital in the so-called bourgeois cities of Western Europe and the Americas.

As such, their planning bore much in common with Soviet cities in general. But these sensibilities were also joined by the constraint of remoteness and by the centrality of the town-forming enterprise in providing basic amenities in these remote locations. Town-forming enterprises typically provided a complete set of amenities for their workers, including housing, employment, social institutions, entertainment, food, power, road networks, sanitation infrastructure, and, especially, central heating—usually provided as industrial waste heat. Furthermore, those monotowns, which were sited in especially remote locations, often had to develop sources of water and construct new railway lines in order to provide access. Monotowns were also involved in population planning, and as such, they often emerged as national social microcosms, with workers drawn from every corner of the national territory, and sometimes beyond. The ex-novo construction of ostensibly complete urban industrial settlements inevitably led to questions about the quantity of amenities to be provided, the nature of the town to be built, how it would look, what kind of people would live in it, and what the ideal city size was. Planning in the Soviet Union assumed that there were optimal solutions to these complex considerations, that they should and could be answered by planners, and that those answers ought to constitute national standards to be applied broadly for urban production. Such standards would eventually come to define a complex urban model that strove for uniformity and continuity even as diverse circumstances and geographies catalyzed its transformation through time and space.

Defining the Monotown

MONOTOWN: URBAN DREAMS BRUTAL IMPERATIVES

“The historical background of all the events that took place in Russia during the past 500 years has always been land.”

—Berthold Lubetkin, lecture given to the Institute of Landscape Architects at the Architectural Association, December 19321

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