Microdistrict as an element of a city’s visual representation the Tyumen region

About the author:

Dmitry O. Bubnov, Postgraduate Student, Department of History and World Politics; research laboratory assistant, Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Research of Space, University of Tyumen, d.o.bubnov@utmn.ru

Abstract:

This article studies the formation of the visual image of the late Soviet city in 1960s – early 1990s in Western Siberia, approaches to representation and some of its elements. The author aims to show the process of formation of the visual representation of the Western Siberian city of the late Soviet period during the industrial development. The object of the study is an image of the microdistrict as a central element of urban space in late Soviet era. These cities actively developed during the development of the West Siberian oil and gas complex, which allowed to turn these cities into an experimental platform for bold everyday life solutions. This defined new approaches to the visual representation of the late-Soviet city, where the focus was not only on squares, factories and “advanced socialist districts”, like the 1930s. These changes can be traced to the emergence of new elements of the visual image of the city. One of such elements of the visual image of the late Soviet West Siberian city was a microdistrict that appeared during the transition to standardized housing construction that began in the 1950s. It was a “city in miniature” with its own social infrastructure, streets, but it was still reflecting the old idea of a “collective community of Soviet society” in general. These factors predetermined the specificity of the visual image of the late Soviet city, which was an industrial, economic, scientific and cultural center.

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