TY - JOUR
TI - Reinventing Urban Identities in Kazan
AU - Turowska, Aleksandra
TI - Reinventing Urban Identities in Kazan
AB - 
	The paper aims to consider how, since the early 1990s, the city space of Kazan is shaped by different social actors. This paper assumes that a key influence on the process of social production of space in Kazan was the procedure of gaining autonomy after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the lo­cal variant of economic transformation into the global market system. From the beginning of the post-socialist transition, elites’ strategies were related to the politics of memory and the ideas of mul­ticulturalism and federalism. Consequently, Kazan underwent the process of reinventing of urban identity, and indigenization (by Hughes [2007] it was called Tatarazing) of city space. In the capital of Tatarstan the financialization of city space, accumulation through expropriation, and develop­ment by megaevents can be observed. Strategies of development enforced by elites are contested by city inhabitants and grassroots initiatives concentrated around the protection of architectural heritage. Centralized and hierarchical power in Tatarstan makes the grassroots initiatives’ demands possible by a collaboration with local elites.

	* This paper was created as a result of a research project entitled “Social Construction of Space: Anthropological Study of City-Forming Practices in Kazan” numbered 2017/27/N/HS3/02046 funded by the National Science Centre in Poland.
VL - 2021
IS - Tom 49 Numer 1-2
PY - 2021
SN - 0083-4327
C1 - 2299-9558
SP - 63
EP - 84
DO - 10.4467/22999558.PE.21.005.14127
UR - https://ejournals.eu/czasopismo/prace-etnograficzne/artykul/reinventing-urban-identities-in-kazan
KW - post-soviet transition
KW - urban development
KW - political culture
KW - elites
KW - heritage
KW - Kazan
KW - Tatarstan
KW - Russia