The modernization of Russia through the urban transformations in the cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg

Extract

[...] In fact, one may think that industrialization is the main factor of urban growth in the cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg at the end of the 19th century. The question of the relationship between industrialization and urbanization is actually not that simple and it is important to study this relationship further in order to fully understand the modernization of Russia. Cities are obviously very attractive for industries because of the concentrated presence of workers and consumers. “Cities provided a favorable infrastructure in which the broad array of scale-type economies made possible by new productive techniques and mode of industrial organization could most fully be exploited” explains Thomas Fedor. [...]

[...] This latter one reflects how Russia's goal at that time is to impose itself as a real political, diplomatic, military and cultural power in Europe. Finally, the very way in which cities are constructed and the means of transportation getting more substantial reflect the material modernization of Russia in that period was embodied in the industrial revolution. Thus, modernization of Russia in the second half of the 19th century has example in the urban organization, and can be seen through the prism of urbanism of the two biggest cities of [...]

[...] The emancipation of the serfs brought a lot of people to cities after 1861, and the development of railroads (entering more and more the cities of Moscow in the 1860s) made Moscow a very dynamic center of the country, apart from St. Petersburg. The movement of different kinds of stores from the center to the periphery, allowed by the creation of the electric tram at the end of the century, along with the pre-existing urban tradition of trade in Moscow, widely shaped a new city. [...]

[...] In the beginning of the century, the sewage was going directly to the Moskva in Moscow and the Neva in St. Petersburg. This sanitarian issue is at first not really taken into considerations by the Muscovite and Petersburg municipalities and led to a disease of drinking water in 1837. A more and more substantial part of the urban population has access to water and gas (up to 3 persons over 4 in 1910). The 19th century is a century of progress in the sanitarian issue, with the modernization of medicine. [...]

[...] II) The construction of the cities As said before, the second half of the 19th century in Russia is characterized by an increase in the number and the size of Russian cities. If one can, like Thomas Fedor, see the growth of urbanism in Russia as a pattern, one can also see that only a few towns are very relevant of that transformation. Those cities are mainly St. Petersburg, Moscow and Odessa. They are the only three that had a population of over one hundred thousand at the end of the century. [...]