ИСТИНА

Among the processes of contemporary urbanisation attracting much research interest is the growing functional complexity of the metropolitan peripheries. Likewise, the collapse of state-socialism in Russia has been followed by an increased functional and social fragmentation of metropolitan edges. However, despite a growing body of research that explores and compares the metropolitan periphery in Central and Western Europe, the suburban processes in the post-Soviet countries (beyond the Baltic States) remain little studied. This paper develops a better understanding of the pathways of functional transformation of Moscow suburban periphery, particularly focusing on conceptualising residential transformations. One of the most important features in the development of Moscow periphery has traditionally been the polarity between, on the one hand, the main hierarchy of settlements where people would reside permanently (including Moscow itself, satellite cities and towns of varied size, villages, etc) and, on the other hand, the areas of seasonal residence - dispersed summer-home "dacha" settlements consisting of self-built developments of various epochs and standards, which lack administrative functions and many life-supporting services (schools, healthcare etc). Such settlements, which are better characterised as ex-urbanisation rather than suburbanisation, mushroomed on the onset of the market and land reform in the 1990s. They are very distinctive in the international context and yet are omnipresent in Moscow city-region. For example, the number of such dacha settlements is twice the number of permanent-residence villages. However, increasing car ownership, disposable wealth, and demand for capital accumulation have fuelled the emergence of so-called "cottage settlements", including those built as large-scale developer-led projects and gated settlements of various standards and value. The process has been changing the character of residential suburbanisation more recently to introduce further complexity to, although not to blur, the dualism of permanent and dacha settlements. The number of such "cottage settlements" near Moscow has exceeded 1,000. At first sight the process also resembles more the "suburbanisation" in the international connotation. However, the gated nature of many cottage settlements disintegrates them from the outside, while they rarely develop a sense of community inside - o that Moscow continues to produce "suburbanisation without suburbs". The cottage settlements emphasise social uniformity and polarisation. While city in Russia is still characterised by the Soviet legacy of socio-spatial mix and the dominance of high-rise housing, where social segregation is limited, it is the periphery, with its path-independency, that is becoming the playground for socio-spatial inequality and most cruel forms of wealth polarisation and therefore the cradle for future social conflicts.