The UN Sustainable Development Goal 11 in Russia. Housing in Saint Petersburg: providing access to safe, adequate, and affordable housing for all

Abstract

Housing is crucial for human livelihood. Nevertheless, many people globally are still unable to access safe, adequate, and affordable housing. In the case of Saint Petersburg, the city is facing a significant housing shortage, and many housing facilities are of low quality. The metropolis experienced a transition from a Soviet public housing model to a more privatised one, although this process has not laid out satisfactory results. Accordingly, this thesis analyses the housing situation in the former Leningrad. Firstly, it introduces the analytical framework: the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 11, which considers sustainable cities and communities, and the Target 11.1 “Safe and affordable housing,” together with the places of study, which are Saint Petersburg and Russia. Secondly, a historical section evaluates housing from late tsarist Russia, to the Soviet Union, and post-Soviet Russia. It outlines the situation in Soviet times and delves into the phenomena that led to structural housing transformations: the 1917 Revolutions and the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. The following section assesses inappropriate housing, and non-housing, which is homelessness. For this, it considers the insights gained from an interview with Daniil Kramorov, a staff member of Nochlezhka, the leading homelessness-related NGO in Russia. The following section explores the Soviet right to ‘quasi-free housing’ regarding the Soviet housing model and tests its’ pervasiveness among Russian university students from the Higher School of Economics (HSE) through a survey. To end, a section suggests measures to cope with housing challenges in Saint Petersburg.