Moscow Housing Renovation Programme

In early 2018, President Putin and Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin held a televised meeting in which they announced a large-scale urban reconstruction project. Aimed at a class of buildings constructed in the 1950s and 1960s, the project involved demolishing 5,800 apartment houses and relocating more than 1.6 million residents. While the risky policy did prompt some protest in Spring 2018, it also garnered significant popular support.

Seminar

In this talk, Professor Regina Smyth will compare the nature of the support for the programme among three groups:

• those whose houses were included
• those who were excluded
• those who were not eligible for consideration

The analysis demonstrates that the support for the programme varied across these three groups. The findings illustrate the regimes’ capacity to respond to social demands, construct policy processes, and redistribute wealth to secure support without alienating Muscovites who did not directly benefit from the programme. Based on a collaborative research project, this talk is based on new survey and focus group data collected in Winter 2019.

Speaker profiles

Regina Smyth as an Associate Professor of Political Science at Indiana University. Professor Smyth’s research explores state-society relations around formal representative institutions such elections and legislative decision-making based on original data collection.

Her current work focuses on governance and regime stability in non-democratic states and explores the institutional constraints on the political agenda in Hong Kong, the relationship between elections and post-election protest in Russia, and the legacy of protest in Ukraine.

Smyth’s work has appeared in Comparative Political, Comparative Political Studies, the American Political Science Review, Russian Politics, Europe-Asia Studies and Post-Soviet Affairs.

Accessibility

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