In Search of the Lost Image

What is the relationship between the genius loci (the authentic spirit of a place), the rise of the abstraction in the knowledge production, and neoliberal economy? As recent critiques of Jane Jacobs-inspired urbanist theory have demonstrated, a rejection of large-scale urban renewal projects carries the danger of gentrification. The Iron Curtain notwithstanding, similar approaches critical of state-socialist urbanism emerged in the Soviet Union. Carrying a tacit political critique of state-socialist urbanism and, by extension, of the Soviet political regime, after the 1990’s, they embraced the neoliberal ideology of the post-Soviet transition. My dissertation will examine the most prominent of these approaches, “metageography”—an original theory of space developed by geographer Dmitry Zamyatin (b. 1962) between the 1980’s and 2010’s. At the center of his theory are geographic images, understood as systems of interconnected signs, symbols, and stereotypes characterizing the territory, landscape or country. Within the framework of this theory, geography turns into imaginative or metageography, “the images of space and the space of images.” As my dissertation will demonstrate, the development of Zamyatin’s theory not only continued the humanization and dematerialization of Soviet geography initiated in the 1960’s and 1970’s, but also played a significant role in the reception of Western humanistic, postmodern and new cultural geographies (such as the work of Yi-Fu Tuan, Ed Soja, or Denis Cosgrove) in the late USSR. Yet, this evolution coincided with the neoliberal transition in Russia, and eventually contributed to the formation of Russia’s contemporary neo-imperialist ideology. In particular, it shaped the pragmatics of regional development through tools such as territorial branding through the use of geographic images and the modeling of spatial identities. Analyzing the complex interplay between humanism and neoliberalism, state power and civil activism, my dissertation will push the boundaries of cultural geography to explore its potential and limitations in the post-socialist context.