Doctoral Dissertation Research: The "Baltic Pearl" in the Window to Europe: St. Petersburg's Chinese Quarter

University Of Oregon Eugene, Eugene OR

Investigators

Abstract

There is growing evidence that Russia is carving out a new political and economic position between East and West, including its membership in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization with China and Kazakhstan. One striking example comes from Russia's second-largest city, St. Petersburg, where a major commercial-residential district financed by development firms from Shanghai heralds a new wave of Chinese investment. The goal of this research is to understand the implications of this project both for Russia's changing international position and for the local populace. The research will thus situate the urban development project within the evolving Sino-Russian investment arena and explore its impacts on the attitudes and perspectives of St. Petersburg residents. Both aspects of the study will employ qualitative methods and spatial analysis using geographic information systems (GIS). At the core of the project are the following questions: 1) To what extent does the Chinese quarter in St. Petersburg resemble other urban mega-projects worldwide? 2) What is the role played by specific actors in bringing in foreign capital and rearranging the internal geography of the city? 3) What is the impact of the Chinese quarter on local sense of place? Newspaper reports, interviews with officials, and on-site observation will provide the basis of addressing the first two questions and will facilitate the creation of a map of Petersburg's "terrain of investment." The sense of place of officials, pro-development residents, skeptical residents, and Chinese migrants will be studied through participant observation, surveys, interviews, and original mapping symbols designed in GIS. The proposed research offers an innovative combination of research methods in order to study multiple levels of a development occurring in St. Petersburg, Russia. It will contribute a research model useful for studying other societies in transition by examining attitudes towards change among both local residents and immigrants and by combining analysis of policy documents with interviews and mapping based on new data. The research expands knowledge in the field of Russian studies by adding micro-level data to existing geopolitical and economic analyses, and also looks at a significant new case of Chinese transnational immigration. The results will generate new information and conceptual categories for evaluating Russia's current and future development. The Chinese quarter project suggests a variety of trends, including St. Petersburg's integration into the "world city" system at the expense of economic connections to its surrounding territory; direct competition for world investment by creating an "urban mega-project" near its downtown; a drastically changed sense of urban space for St. Petersburg itself; and the emergence of potential spaces of conflict between migrants and residents with differing views on urban development.