Is there room for migrants? Representations of St. Petersburg in local newspapers

Master’s Thesis in Human Geography: University of Eastern Finland, Faculty of Social Sciences and Business Studies, Department of Geographical and Historical Studies, 2014.Uneven economic development in the post-Soviet countries has resulted in proliferation of labour migration from economically less developed regions of Central Asia and Transcaucasia toward big Russian cities, where salaries are better and urban regeneration combined with demographic decline creates a demand for workforce. Increasing presence of labour migrants since the late 90s has changed the population structure in the cities and led to reconsiderations of not only economic but also ethnic difference, categories of ‘us’ and ‘them’, and who is welcome to the city. Tensions within the society, violence and clashes between different social groups are increasingly being defined in ethnic terms, and public and media discourses further contribute to the understanding of migrants as racialised, ethnic others. In this thesis I look at media representations and conceptions of St. Petersburg in the light of changing form of diversity and socio-ethnic exclusion of labour migrants. How do the social and ethnic margins fit to, and create the spatial margins of the mental maps that guide the everyday life of city dwellers, and how does the image and identity of the city affect the very way in which diversity is perceived? Marginality, its form and location is not seen as a predetermined phenomenon, but is understood as social construction that derives from understanding of difference (in ethnic, social or other terms) either as a constructive and positive, or foreign, threatening and negative part of locality. On one hand, global and regional economies and the city’s position within national and international political and administrative systems all localize in the city and become negotiated, resisted or absorbed, in each case transforming the material and social conditions of the city in a unique way. On the other hand, city as a physical space is a container, the character of which is created in interaction with what it contains. How residents understand the city, how they recognize it as their own, depends on their image of the container: the stories told about it and its past, its position in regional, national, international or global systems, as well as mental maps of everyday life with its margins and centres, inhabited by ‘us’ and ‘them’. Against this background I study St. Petersburg. On one hand, it has gained a reputation as a city hostile to difference and others, as a city where migrants and ethnic others face discrimination in their everyday life. On the other hand, narratives about multicultural and cosmopolitan Petersburg that gained its character and particularity from diversity, and Soviet Leningrad that embraced brotherhood of nations as an antithesis for fascism, are being told. The city images employed in the talk about migrants, and the everyday practice of social and spatial exclusion of migrants seem to contradict in the newspaper representations of locality. By analysing texts that articulate images and identities of St. Petersburg in relation to the labour migrants, I trace how the image of multicultural, ‘tolerant’ city is formed and what is its relation to marginality. By looking at the representations of everyday life, I try to grasp the logic of spatial realisation of ‘otherness’, margins and difference, the way the city is appropriated for different actors and how the actors’ relation to the city is conceptualised. In the end, I try to understand why, despite the emerging articulation of multicultural history of the city, the labour migrants are pushed to the margins of the city life