Dwelling in failure: power and uncertainty in a socialist large housing estate regeneration program in Saint Petersburg, Russia

The main purpose of this paper is to explore how the fragmentation of home ownership, combined with the inefficiencies of top-down decision making at an institutional level, impact the implementation of a regeneration program for the aged housing stock (known as khrushchevki ) built in Saint Petersburg, Russia during the 1950s and 1960s. We show how housing privatization has led to a predominance of private micro-ownership and discuss how this has shaped a peculiar power structure in the Russian housing sector characterised by the significant bargaining power of property owners. Combined with the inefficiencies of top-down decision making and constantly changing governance patterns in St. Petersburg, this has created massive obstacles for a major public regeneration program known as Renovatsiya and led to its eventual failure. Through the case study of one of the Renovatsiya zones in St. Petersburg, we identify shifts in respective roles of the state, developers and residents which sheds new light on the connections between privatization and marketization in the regeneration of large housing estates in Russia.