ENVIRONMENT-RUSSIA: City Life Begins to Collapse

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Sergei Blagov

MOSCOW, Jun 7 2002 (IPS) - The partial collapse of a nine-storey building in St. Petersburg this week is symptomatic of the collapse of Russia’s urban infrastructure.

Emergency situations minister Sergei Shoigu said the collapse of the building killing four in Russia’s second biggest city after Moscow, was the result of poor design and construction.

Such problems plague a thousand cities and twice as many smaller towns that house about 100 million people.

Dilapidated structures and a collapsing infrastructure are the most urgent problem facing Russia’s urban development, Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov told a meeting in Moscow on sustainable urban development Wednesday, the day the building collapsed.

Kasyanov proposed municipal reforms and new mortgage schemes to improve construction. But construction is only a part of the problem. UN Secretary-general Kofi Annan spoke at the Moscow meeting of other problems in Russian cities such as crime, environmental pollution and poverty. These problems cannot be tackled without good governance, he said.

Earlier, President Vladimir Putin ordered the government to cope more effectively with problems in towns and cities. Putin addressed the need to sort out such fundamental problems as heating and electricity supply.

Many towns and cities suffered electricity failures last winter. Heating systems continued to fail in cities through the freezing winter.

A major difficulty is the so-called “central heating” put in place in buildings during the Soviet days. It takes just a minor pipeline failure to cut off heating. These systems which mean pumping of huge amounts of hot water into multi-apartment blocks are wasteful of energy and expensive to maintain.

Heating was almost entirely subsidised by the Soviet state. Now many in Russia’s cities are unable to pay the rising bills. And the huge investment needed to replace these obsolete systems with efficient and environment-frien dly alternatives is not forthcoming.

Kremlin announced earlier this year that it had reached an agreement with the World Bank for an 85 million dollar loan to modernise heating systems. But Russia’s cities need far more.

Few can take advantage of new mortgage schemes to pay for new construction. Real estate is far too expensive for most people. Experts warn that many Soviet-era apartment blocks could become unusable and many Russians could end up living in shanty towns, unable to afford decent housing.

Local authorities do not have sufficient funds to develop the urban infrastructure, governor of Samara region in Central Russia Konstantin Titov told the conference on urban development. “During the sixties and seventies the former Soviet Union kept up a high growth in urban construction,” Titov said. “Now Russian regions do not have enough money even to dismantle dilapidated buildings.”

Russian cities also face a deteriorating environment. Experts say the quality of air and water needs to be improved in many cities.

In more than 30 cities and towns, environmental pollution is five times above permitted levels, says Yuri Tsaturov, deputy head of the Federal Environmental Monitoring Service.

Towns in the industrial Urals and in Western Siberia such as Magnitogorsk, Novokuznetsk, Omsk, Khabarovsk and Yekaterinburg have become the country’s most polluted cities, Tsaturov says. About 20,000 deaths a year are indirectly caused by environmental pollution, he says.