ABSTRACT
The Russian dacha is a highly varied phenomenon but one in which all strata of the population are involved, from the poor to the richest. This chapter discusses the dacha as a possible agent of sub-urbanisation in contemporary Russia. It argues that the dacha does not fit neatly into the categories used to analyse settlement formation in the modern world, even though it shares many of the features of post-industrial second-home development in Western Europe and North America. The chapter uses data collected in Moscow and adjacent regions over a period of two decades in a series of studies. It discusses new geography of second home development in Russia by pointing to the transformations that have been taking place in successive zones around the country's two capitals. The social geography of the extra-urban dacha landscape has been slowly coming into clearer focus in the past two decades.
