Development of the Urban Planning Cadastre in Russia

The system of urban and regional planning and management in Russia is experiencing a deep crisis (Razumov 1996). The reasons for the crisis relate to the general economic decline in the country over the last several years, the technological backwardness of the managerial infrastructure at local level, and the incompatibility of the ‘Soviet’ mentality of a large group of political and managerial elite to the new tasks of the transition period. The crisis of spatial planning and management has many manifestations. Before perestroika, spatial development was, to a large extent, regulated by a hierarchical system of urban planning documents, from the General Settlement Scheme at the national level to projects detailing plans for administrative districts at the local level. These documents, developed within the system by the State Committee on Construction and Architecture for the entire area of the country, were enforced through the local architecture and urban planning agencies of the Government. With land ownership and managerial rights belonging to a sole entity, the Soviet state, the planning documents represented prescriptive allocations of land and other resources computed as normative multipliers of the projected population. Common errors in such projections (Lappo 1978, Medvedkova 1990) and the relative weakness of spatial management, compared to planning and management by branches of industry, left mostly declarative, ideological functions to the former.