Behind left behind: What coastal cities on the Russian Far East tell us about marginalities in the concept of abandonment

Abstract

Both concepts of abandonment and left behindness tend to denotate comparatively well-defined spaces with an established set of features. Despite inner variety, a lot of areas can be described and studied using those notions. However, there also exist areas of a complex regional context, such that their nature can be grasped only in a specific intersection and even interference of notions that include abandonment, left behindness, remoteness and urban shrinkage.

Such a complex view is determined by the uniqueness of the case considered. A town of Soviet Gavan is situated on a Pacific Coast in the Far East of Russia. It forms a small coastal urban agglomeration of settlements that specialize on logistics, fish processing, military, and ship repair industry. The fate and modern state of the city is affected by an internal growth cycles of economic agents at varying scales, interrupted by the fall of the Soviet Union, as well as decline in the competitiveness of the remote regions in the context of knowledge economy and globalization, a sharp drop in transport accessibility due to the rising transportation costs in the transition to the market economy and a number of other factors. In sum, Soviet Gavan is an area of a failed Soviet megaproject that was trapped in a perfect storm that predetermined a structural crisis of its urban development and resulted in an abandonment of an entire agglomeration components.

Combining both Soviet infrastructure disintegration and “out of sync” development trajectory, Soviet Gavan is a special case of various forms of abandonment inside overall left-behind region. After a first field study in year 2021 we have combined the results of in-depth interviews, historical studies, behavioral geography and geospatial research to realize that our whole research optics needs to be adjusted to account for non-classical variations in the concepts of abandonment and left behindness. We had discovered that there exist lacunae that diminish the applicability of our research tools. In this research we try to shed the light on that gaps to underline specific issues that are faced by inhabitants of such lesser-studied areas.

For the case of Soviet Gavan to be comprehensively studied it is necessary to use the concepts of spatial peripherality, shrinkage, and even the remoteness notion. One can see a complex interference and, to some degree, a competition between different notions, their connotations and corresponding research optics. The phenomenon of Soviet infrastructure massive abandonment is well-known, but modern studies focus on Arctic areas or post-Soviet countries. Abandonment on the edge of urban often is ignored, as well as inhabited landscapes that combine it with growth. Having studied the Soviet Gavan, we propose a fine-tuning of the abandonment concept to better account for fundamental regional differences and study alike spaces that exist on edges and simultaneously combine features that are more common on their own.