The Southern Square in the Baltic Pearl: Chinese ambition and “European” architecture in St. Petersburg, Russia

Abstract

The Baltic Pearl is a 205-hectare development project underway southwest of St. Petersburg, Russia, originally financed and designed by a consortium of firms from Shanghai, China. This paper analyzes the discourse surrounding the development of one section of the Baltic Pearl, the commercial multiplex Southern Square, particularly the use of the term “European” as used to signal the project's intended cultural orientation and to exert control over the interaction between Russian planners and Chinese developers. In the negotiation over the form of the multiplex, control over architectural style emerges as leverage for preservation of cultural norms and local autonomy. In further analysis, the situation emerges as an example of Sassen's [(2008) Territory, Authority, Rights. From Medieval to Global Assemblages. Princeton: Princeton University Press] shifting assemblages, that is, a reassembling of global influences in a space invoked as national as well as local.

Keywords:

• national identity
• urban change
• post-socialist planning

Acknowledgements

The author would like to acknowledge the helpful comments of the reviewers. Research for this manuscript was made possible in part through National Science Foundation DDRI grant 0623599.

Notes

The genesis of the project and its connection to the Chinese state as well as details of its implementation through committees of the St. Petersburg administration have been discussed in Dixon 2010a.

Certainly large projects were carried out under the Soviet regime. However, strikingly, in more than one interview, planners in St. Petersburg lamented the way that lack of funds in the Soviet period prevented the full realization of urban designs, leaving large housing areas deprived of promised amenities and effective infrastructure (e.g. Nikitin interview). They clearly expected that Chinese wealth could overcome those constraints.

The reaction of St. Petersburgers to, for example, the proposal for the Gazprom skyscraper (first known as Gazprom-city and later as Okhta-Center) is not merely a case of cultural conservatism; an important catalyst for the resistance was a desire to preserve the political leverage of developing local building codes, which “Okhta-Center” at first ignored (see Dixon 2010b). (Also see Ruble 1990 about the political role of Petersburg landscapes in the 1980s.) That case further differs from the Baltic Pearl in that the conflict was Russian-on-Russian, in a way Moscow vs. St. Petersburg. That controversy in fact shifted responses to the Baltic Pearl, which began to seem extremely mild by comparison.