“The Pearl of the Urals”

Taking the city of Miass (Chelyabinsk region) as an example, this article examines the historical aspect of the formation of the symbolic capital of Russian secondtier industrial cities. The author demonstrates that the vision of the city in the twentieth century developed along with the growth of municipal infrastructure, which in turn followed the industrial growth of the city, resulting from a certain “historical luck” of Miass. This industrial growth was programmed by the arrival of the Trans-Siberian Railway, the “overflow” of heavy industry from the mountainous region of neighbouring Zlatoust and the evacuation during the Great Patriotic War. In the 1960s, Miass acquired the status of a ‘naukograd’ (scientific city), thanks to the emergence of a design bureau and a missile industrial complex. Since the end of the nineteenth century, one of the most important elements of the symbolic capital of Miass has been a stable representation of the specific beauty of the nearby mountainous region of the Urals and Lake Turgoyak. The growth of Miass during the Soviet era consolidated the discourse of the natural beauty of this “city in the Golden Valley”, and Lake Turgoyak acquired the reputation of the “Pearl of the Urals”, the importance of which was fully recognised after the environmental protection campaign of the 1970s and 1980s. The collapse of the Soviet planned economy and the transition to a post-industrial society led Miass along the path of inertial development, which contradicts the significant symbolic capital accumulated during the years of urban and industrial growth. The author concludes that the creative development of Miass is possible with the use of the accumulated symbolic capital along two lines, i. e. the rise of tourism or innovative development; however, both lines will require a shift from inertial development to novel and risky investments in social and communal infrastructure

Archaeology · Beauty · Economic geography · Economic history · Economics · Economy · Geography · Industrial city · Political science · Reputation · Social science · Sociology · Symbolic capital · History · Law · Regional Socio-Economic Development Trends · Urbanization and City Planning

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