Monotown: urban dreams brutal imperatives

摘要

A monotown (monogorod in Russian) is, as its name suggests, a single-industry town. More specifically, it is a self-contained urban node built ex novo for a solitary industrial enterprise on a remote site, most often by a socialist state with a robust centralized planning apparatus. The term and urban type were born in the first decades of the Soviet era when urban theorists debated the spatial implications of socialism unleashed on the continental scale. With the ability to consider the economy and territory holistically, Soviet economic and spatial planners could move materials and labour as needed to reach far-flung natural resources, locate enterprises beyond adversarial bombing range, and colonize the sparsely populated sectors of the Eurasian continent simultaneously. They achieved those objectives through the installation of a largely standardized urban module that bundled industry, housing, and social services: the monotown. As Clayton Strange explains in his book's introduction, the term has taken on largely negative connotations in the post-Soviet, post-industrial context, and has become 'synonymous with economic decay' [3]. Monotown: Urban Dreams Brutal Imperatives lays out the history of the urban type and investigates eight case studies in the former USSR, China, and India. The book does not offer solutions to the monotown's problems - decline of heavy industrial output, unemployment, and depopulation - but instead provides context for this under-researched transnational urban phenomenon and highlights the specific conditions and design of each site.