Notes from Moscow
One class and my Moscow everyday encounters have given me many ideas and prompted many questions regarding migration.
Sergei Medvedev teaches the "Problems and Prospects of Eurasia" class and he has a very interesting approach towards Russian politics, economics, and culture from the role that space plays.
For my own work, I think that space - or territory (is this a good definition of space?) - can be an important link that connects my interest in urban planning (the organization and management of space) with migration (the movement of people through space).
An interesting question I had during lecture today is:
What kind of space is necessary for the unobstructed movement of people?
Today Medvedev spoke about Soviet organization of towns. Russia, he said, is divided into regions each with their own pole, or central city. The local centralization mirrors national centralization, where the whole country is centered around Moscow. Most of the resources are organized around the regional capital, with peripheral areas under looser control and less developed. Few roads lead to these peripheral areas and regional borders are nearly impassible because they are formed by overgrown forests. In order to travel to a nearby regional capital, you have to take the road around the region and travel for many more miles than a direct route. 90% of all migration takes place within these regions and there is little inter-regional mobility.
This discussion led me to think that movement of people is determined by the continuity of space. If Russia is organized into these little regions, or compartments, or as one historian called it, a "chocolate bar," with the regional peripheries like chocolate fault lines, then people will move around the regions where routes are provided.
It would be interesting to visualize in this way the European Union and characterize its space. How fluid are the borders of all EU states and how do they determine where people move? Maybe I can visualize/map the space of continents and redraw the map of the world with the thickness of borders indicating their difficulty to cross and not necessarily country barriers. This would be difficult to get all of the information about the borders and regions and find a way to quantify it somehow in order to be able to draw it on some kind of scale.
Some other issues that I would like to mention related to immigration is another one of my Professor's claims that countries with similar GDP per capital have similar economic, political, and cultural levels/institutions. I thought that if he believes in this, then he would also agree that one can find a point of GDP per capita when immigration would begin and when it would stop (speed up or slow down). This would be a huge and easy economic argument for immigration, but just as I disagree with his general claim, I do not think it can apply to the specific example of immigration either.
Other ideas:
Sergei Medvedev teaches the "Problems and Prospects of Eurasia" class and he has a very interesting approach towards Russian politics, economics, and culture from the role that space plays.
For my own work, I think that space - or territory (is this a good definition of space?) - can be an important link that connects my interest in urban planning (the organization and management of space) with migration (the movement of people through space).
An interesting question I had during lecture today is:
What kind of space is necessary for the unobstructed movement of people?
Today Medvedev spoke about Soviet organization of towns. Russia, he said, is divided into regions each with their own pole, or central city. The local centralization mirrors national centralization, where the whole country is centered around Moscow. Most of the resources are organized around the regional capital, with peripheral areas under looser control and less developed. Few roads lead to these peripheral areas and regional borders are nearly impassible because they are formed by overgrown forests. In order to travel to a nearby regional capital, you have to take the road around the region and travel for many more miles than a direct route. 90% of all migration takes place within these regions and there is little inter-regional mobility.
This discussion led me to think that movement of people is determined by the continuity of space. If Russia is organized into these little regions, or compartments, or as one historian called it, a "chocolate bar," with the regional peripheries like chocolate fault lines, then people will move around the regions where routes are provided.
It would be interesting to visualize in this way the European Union and characterize its space. How fluid are the borders of all EU states and how do they determine where people move? Maybe I can visualize/map the space of continents and redraw the map of the world with the thickness of borders indicating their difficulty to cross and not necessarily country barriers. This would be difficult to get all of the information about the borders and regions and find a way to quantify it somehow in order to be able to draw it on some kind of scale.
Some other issues that I would like to mention related to immigration is another one of my Professor's claims that countries with similar GDP per capital have similar economic, political, and cultural levels/institutions. I thought that if he believes in this, then he would also agree that one can find a point of GDP per capita when immigration would begin and when it would stop (speed up or slow down). This would be a huge and easy economic argument for immigration, but just as I disagree with his general claim, I do not think it can apply to the specific example of immigration either.
Other ideas:
- problems of mobility for the Russian state
- Moscovite response to immigrants
posted by chaika at 2:11 AM
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