“Intuitive districts”: Agentive images in a post-socialist city

Abstract

Anyone who has lived in a city knows that, separately from the administrative or electoral districts, there are districts that exist in the imagination. Areas of the city seem to have a distinctive character and ethos. The article suggests that such notional place-forming occurs spontaneously through everyday sensations, life activities, and events and is spontaneously evaluative and comparative. In these ways, a notion of “intuitive district” differs from externally given analytical concepts commonly used in the literature to categorize urban divisions, such as neighborhood or quartier. Intuitive districts are subjective but also widely shared in urban communications. The article argues that they have an objective agency: They influence people's decisions, what they care about, how they move around the city, and interact (or do not interact) with other residents. Using the example of one post-socialist city in Russia (Ulan-Ude), the article explores how intuitive directs have formed and shows how their existence can have effect on highly diverse urban processes and actions, from the formation of gangland territories to house prices, from religious intensification to providing the foundation for public protest.