St. Petersburg’s Double Life

Abstract

St. Petersburg, Russia, consists of a historical city from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries surrounded by vast socialist housing estates constructed after World War II. This article describes the city’s planned pedestrian circulation systems, contrasting them with a second spatial system that the populace has throughout time superimposed on the “official” city and that may be mapped less in a physical than in a sociological sense. In this second city, steeped in communistic values, the threshold between what was once public and private has become redefined, so that the public now enters once-private spaces at will. This article compares the two structures of St. Petersburg and examines how they may be tied into theoretical frameworks of sociospatial mapping.