Paul
Goble
Staunton, April 18 – The Russian
government’s plan to combine cities with their surrounding territories by fiat from
above – a process it calls “agglomeration” -- rather than to allow such units
to emerge naturally and by negotiation will destroy any possibility that these
new political units will benefit the population, according to a leading Moscow
architect.
Instead, Aleksandr Boroznov argues
in a commentary posted online yesterday, talk at the regional affairs ministry suggests
that “agglomeration” is simply a way for the central government to find a way
to allow Moscow city to absorb all or part of Moscow oblast, a plan that had
been “taboo” in the past (chaskor.ru/article/aglomeratsiya_-_mera_razumnosti_31791).
And the way Russian officials are
talking about implementing this idea virtually guarantees that any such new
territory either at the center or elsewhere will undermine the development of
local government and cost the citizenry the benefits of multiple centers of
economic and political organization and power.
Because what the Russian government
appears ready to do in the case of Moscow is likely to set a precedent for
other cities and regions of the Russian Federation, Boroznov argues, it is
critically important to understand how real agglomerations arise and why the “Potemkin
agglomerations” now being proposed are not the same thing. .
Initially, he points out, “agglomerations
arise not organizationally but geographically by the path of a gradual
broadening and the development of territorial and transportation connections of
neighboring administratively independent cities.” But they remain “stillborn”
if the residents or bosses of one area “ignore their neighbors” in another part
of the territory.
“In civilized countries,” the Moscow
architect continues, “such processes begin with the development and adoption of
common documents” for what is to be the agglomeration. And then, “the administrative fusion” and “unification
of subjects” without the destruction of existing forms of self-administration
requires “friendly negotiations.”
But in the case of Russian cities in
general and Moscow in particular, the hyper-centralization of city administration
not only precludes the development of local municipalities within the city but
inevitably drives away those that the city might absorb through its expansion
to include part of what is now Moscow oblast.
When agglomerations emerge naturally and as a
result of agreement, “the problems of the border [of the agglomeration] do not
arise,” he says, because they are the boundaries of the constituent elements
which have decided to join together. But
when agglomerations are created from above, then the question of an
agglomeration’s external borders becomes a lively one.
“The main thing” in a real
agglomeration is “joint action and development and not maps and schemes,” and
if an agglomeration is formed freely and by agreement, it will both promote
local organs of self-administration within it and over time attract adjoining
political units to join with it.
Given existing Russian territorial
units, Boroznov argues, it is critical that units smaller than municipalities
be given the chance to unite with their neighbors who want to form an
agglomeration and that the municipal governments not be able to veto such
changes as they would appear to have now.
That requirement reflects the main
goal of agglomeration, “the preservation and strengthening of a multiplicity of
alternative centers of attraction and centers of local self-administration,”
not only by ensuring that existing municipal councils and governments continue
to exist but that new ones can form.
Unfortunately, Boroznov says, what appears to
be happening in Moscow and elsewhere in the Russian Federation is a new wave of
“Potemkin” villages but this time at the center and in cities and blessing this
process with the entirely inappropriate word “agglomeration” and using it to
block the emergence of democracy at the local level that the country so badly
needs.
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