Comparative sociospatial studies: rethinking hegemony and collective agency through post-socialist industrial towns

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This study examines spatial restructuring in a specifically Soviet/socialist form of company town – the monotown – in Russia and Latvia. We emphasize the distinctive legacies of these towns and examine site-specific histories to unpack community struggles with peripheralization and industrial decline. We develop a socio-spatial comparative approach as a response to what we see as conceptual limitations in the embrace of functionalist views, the overstatement of agency as ‘micro-resistance’, and a mono-scalar and technocratic view of development. Spatializing the analysis of post-Soviet neoliberalism and the issue of hegemony validation and contestation, we highlight how community responses in peripheralized industrial towns evidence a disorganization of counter-hegemonic possibilities and fragmentation of collective agency. This creates a space in which contestation is present but constrained by socio-spatial power asymmetries. Our spatialized and dynamic approach provides a contribution to the global debate on peripheralization and spatial change.