Changing the symbolic language of the urban landscape: Post-socialist transformation in Kyiv

Abstract

This chapter studies the major transformations in an urban environment during the post-socialist period. Kyiv, a city with more than a thousand-year history with distinctive features of Soviet planning, was chosen as an example of a city where new spatial concepts are applied in analyzing its recent development. The authors identified the main challenges of globalization and neoliberal urbanization facing modern urban development as well as their impacts on the urban territory. Among them are changes of the city's economic structure, growth infrastructure, and considerable transformation of the city's image, and digitalization, all of which increase the diversity of social movements and a reshaping of cultural spaces. For a detailed analysis of the current urban landscape transformations, we identify nodal areas of the city, defined as places or strategic points (foci) that have free access and are located at the crossroads of important transport routes. Concentrations of these routes and nodes are also associated with a large number of urban functions that impact centripetal and centrifugal flow. Special attention is paid to the processes of gentrification, commercialization, tertiarization, unification, and homogenization and their influence on nodal areas. Approaches to the improvement of the city's development policy in accordance with the principles of new urbanism are also suggested.