“Suburbia”

I am not the first urbanist to write a book about a city and focus dispro- portionately on a small area in the historic center at the expense of a vast outer ring of urban development. The center always draws those who love cities, has more history, more variety, and more action per unit area, and disproportionately distinguishes the city from other cities. But the zones beyond the center are important, too, and we now turn to a profile of Kyiv’s “residential ring” and its changes in post-Soviet time (Kravets and Sovsun, 2012; Skubytska, 2012; Tyshchenko, 2012b). I write “suburbia” in quotations because not all of the places that we will discuss here are actually beyond Kyiv’s municipal limits. A great many of Kyiv’s bedroom zones (spalni raiony) are well within the city.