This Article Full Text (PDF) References Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to Saved Citations Download to citation manager Add to My Marked Citations Citing Articles Citing Articles via Google Scholar Google Scholar Articles by Tammaru, T. Search for Related Content Social Bookmarking                   What's this?

Suburban Growth and Suburbanisation under Central Planning: The Case of Soviet Estonia

Institute of Geography, University of Tartu, Vanemuise 46, Tartu 51014, Estonia, ttammaru{at}ut.ee

It may be something of a paradox, but the demise of central planning has been parallelled by a surge of work on urbanisation in socialist countries. This paper focuses on the topic of suburbanisation, taking Estonia as a case. To understand more neatly the processes at work, a conceptual distinction between the terms suburban growth, suburbanisation in a narrow (statistical) and wide (including mechanisms of population change) sense is proposed. As part of the wider definition, the following characteristics of suburbanisation in Western countries are brought out: the inner decentralisation of population within agglomerations for environmental reasons, the spread of low-density, detached housing together with blurring of borders between urban and rural areas, and the relation to people's life-course. These form a baseline for comparative research which reveals both similarities and differences in suburban population developments in Estonia.

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    What's this?