International Events in the Non-Capital Post-Soviet City: Between Place-Making and Recentralization

Recent urban studies have examined the historical and cultural variability by which “the urban” and “the global” have been constructed by scholars and the public. I contend that post-socialist geographers must (1) consider this variability seriously and (2) advance it by exploring the place major events occupy in the institutional practices of urban officials and the strategies of developers. I focus on the run-up to the SCO and BRIC summits in Ekaterinburg (the fourth largest city in the Russian Federation) in 2009 and the ways they were presented to the public. I attempt to analyze these events in terms of the local politics and construction processes as the site of a multiscalarity of urban changes and globalized place-making in contemporary Russia. I argue that a growing and multiscalar international interdependence has a particular bearing on the legitimacy and operational feasibility of development authorities and urban institutions. This international interdependence affects the emergence of neoliberal strategies of alliance-making between subnational politicians and business communities.