The Right to Housing: Differentiation of Practices in implementing Resettlement of Emergency Housing Stock Policy in Arkhangelsk

Abstract

The collapse of state socialism and turn toward neoliberalism have led to a reduction of state support for industries, investments into science and military activities causing a structural crisis in the Russian North. Associated with the crises outmigration was aggravated by ageing and natural population decline (Eberstadt 2011) leading to depopulation and loss of social control over territories in the Russian Arctic except for the oil and gas provinces (Heleniak 2017). But the state policy has retained the declaration of power in the field of housing policy. Abandoned infrastructures and declining settlements are not solely ‘monuments’ of state socialism; they are also evidence of the current austerity, infrastructural underfunding, and the changing priorities of the Russian state (Bennett 2020). Moreover, depopulation, decay, and abandonment are not endemic to the Russian Far North but may be found in other parts of the Arctic (Heleniak, Turunen, Wang 2020) due to the novel reterritorialization of economic and political power that entails the ‘departure’ of capital and the state (Dzenovska 2020). Power is the same resource as infrastructure.Shrinkage and abandonment are spatially unequal (Mallah 2015). Also, power resources are unevenly distributed. In the current contribution, we focus on the distribution of power resources in a polarised urban space in the field of housing policy in the case of Arkhangelsk, Russia. State policy declares a monopoly on regulation in the field of housing policy. Against this background, we examine that practices in politics are differentiated and can be expressed by different actors through ‘nondecision’. This leads to a government acting as a situational tactic rather than a strategy. And the very notion of power is not limited to local government.