Urban demographic decline in the traditional industrial regions of the Urals (1959–2010)

Authors

  • Sergey Bakanov

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.15826/qr.2017.1.211

Abstract

This article considers the demographic disaster that occurred in traditional industrial Ural cities between the 1960s and the 2000s and demonstrates its scale. A ‘depressed city’ is a term denoting a stage in a city’s development: it is characterised by a decline in production, the emergence of unemployment, and a decrease in investment and migration, all of which is followed by a fall in population. This research is based on calculations and comparisons of the demographic dynamics found in the All-Soviet Union and All-Russian censuses of 1959, 1970, 1979, 1980, 2002, and 2010 from the perspective of a number of individual Ural towns. The Urals have faced the same problems as American cities of the Appalachian region, German cities of the Ruhr district, and British coalmining and metallurgical regions in the 20th century. The author proposes a method for revealing depressed settlements. It uses two demographic criteria: first, a decrease of population exceeding five percent per decade and, second, the stability of a negative demographic balance across several decades. In accordance with this method, it is established that during the late Soviet period (1959–89) 18 Ural towns could be characterised as depressed. Between the 1960s and 1980s, such tendencies had a local nature in the Urals, mainly affecting mining areas and some metallurgical centres. However, between the 1990s and 2000s structural economic reforms and a shift to market forms of economic management caused a dramatic decline in production, mass unemployment, and a drop in living standards: 56 Ural cities thus became depressed. Only the cities of Bashkortostan, where petrochemical production has a significant presence, showed population growth, while other regions witnessed a significant loss of population. Once a local problem, depression became a sub-regional phenomenon striking entire agglomerations and territorial production complexes. Major Ural cities were unable to absorb all of the migration from settlements and towns of the region, which caused an outflow of population from the Urals. The two post-Soviet decades can be characterised by large-scale urban decline in the Urals: there was, on average, a 6.4 per cent population decrease in all the cities of the Ural macro-region.

References

Alekseev, V. V., Zubkov, K. I., Kilin, A. P., Shirogorov, V. V. (1992). Zarubezhnyy opyt antidepressionnoy regionalnoy politiki [The Foreign Experience of Antidepressive Regional Policy]. 95 p. Yekaterinburg, Izdatelstvo UrO RAN.
Bakanov S. А. (2005). Depressivnye goroda Urala v 1960–1980-e gg.: Аnaliz sotsial’no-ekonomicheskikh i demograficheskikh faktorov [Depressed Towns of the Urals between the 1960s and 1980s. An Analysis of Socio-Economic and Demographic Factors]. 191 p. Chelyabinsk, Izdatelstvo CHelGU.
Federalnaya sluzhba gosudarstvennoj statistiki : Oficialnyj sajt [Federal State Statistics Service. Official Website]. URL: http://www.gks.ru/wps/wcm/connect/ rosstat_main/rosstat/ru/statistics/population/demography/# (mode of access: 20.09.2015).
Glazyev, S. U. (2012). Sovremennaya teoriya dlinnykh voln v razvitii ekonomiki [The Modern Theory of Long Waves in Economic Development]. In Ekonomicheskaya nauka sovremennoy Rossii, 2 (57), pp. 8–27.
Lyubovny, V. (1998). Krizisnye goroda Rossii : puti i mekhanizmy sotsial’noekonomicheskoy reabilitatsii i razvitiya [Crisis Cities of Russia: Means and Mechanisms of Socio-Economic Rehabilitation and Development]. 94 p. Moscow, MONF.
Naselenie SSSR po dannym vsesoyuznoj perepisi naseleniya 1959 g. [The Population of the USSR: According to Data of the All-Union Census of 1959]. Moscow, Goskomstat, 1960.
Naselenie SSSR po dannym vsesoyuznoj perepisi naseleniya 1970 g. [The Population of the USSR: According to the Data of the All-Union Census of 1970]. Moscow, Goskomstat, 1971.
Naselenie SSSR po dannym vsesoyuznoj perepisi naseleniya 1979 g. [The Population of the USSR: According to the Data of the All-Union Census of 1979]. Moscow, Goskomstat, 1980.
Naselenie SSSR po dannym vsesoyuznoj perepisi naseleniya 1989 g. [The Population of the USSR: According to the Data of the All-Union Census of 1989]. Moscow, Goskomstat, 1990.
Neffke, F. M. H., Henning, M. and Boschma, R. (2012). The Impact of Aging and Technological Relatedness on Agglomeration Externalities: A Survival Analysis. In J. of Economic Geography, 12 (2), pp. 485–517.
Peres, K. (2011). Tekhnologicheskie revolyucii i finansovyj capital dinamika puzyrej i periodov procvetaniya [Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital. The Dynamics of Bubbles and Periods of Prosperity]. 323 p. Moscow, Delo.
Rowland, R. H. (1980). Declining and Stagnant Towns of the USSR. In Soviet Geography: Rev. and Translation, 1, pp. 195–218.
Steiner, М. (1985). Old Industrial Areas: A Theoretical Approach. In Urban Studies. Vol. 22, pp. 387–398.
Starodubrovskaya I. (2011) Strategii razvitiya staropromyshlennykh gorodov : mezhdunarodnyy opyt i perspektivy v Rossii [Strategies of Development in Traditional Industrial Cities: International Experience and Prospects in Russia] 248 p. Moscow, Izdatelstvo Instituta Gajdara.
The UK Population: Past, Present And Future. URL: www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/ctu/annual...statistics/.../chap-15-population.xls (mode of access: 10.09.2015).
Todtling, F., Trippl, M. (2004). Like Phoenix from the Ashes? The Renewal of Clusters in Old Industrial Areas. In Urban Studies, Vol. 41, № 5/6, pp. 1175–1195.
Vserossijskaya perepis naseleniya 2002 g. [National Population Census 2002]. URL: http://www.perepis2002.ru/index.html?id=11 (mode of access: 20.09.2015).
Vserossijskaya perepis naseleniya 2010 g. [National Population Census 2010]. URL: http://www.gks.ru/free_doc/new_site/perepis2010/croc/perepis_itogi1612.htm (mode of access: 20.09.2015).

Published

2017-04-12

How to Cite

Bakanov, S. (2017). Urban demographic decline in the traditional industrial regions of the Urals (1959–2010). Quaestio Rossica, 5(1), 74–85. https://doi.org/10.15826/qr.2017.1.211

Issue

Section

Problema voluminis