What is the Private Sector in Russia?

The most common type of informal architecture in Russia is the so-called Private Sector. In the Russian language, the Private Sector has two meanings. The first meaning is the familiar to English speakers economic term – the part of the national economy that is not under direct government control. The second meaning is a town planning term, which is a cumulative term for privately-owned structures and additions created with limited or no government oversight. I will be focusing on the latter in this article.

How did the Private Sector appear?

The term dates back to the Soviet Union when private and public spheres were acutely adversarial to one another. The limits of your personal property in construction were the primary residence (apartment or house), and the secondary residence (summer cabin, so-called “dacha”). You could sell or rent your personal property if you comply with strict regulations. However, you could not be a landlord in the traditional sense. You could not own houses that were not your primary or secondary residence and profit off them - this scale of the economic activity was permitted only for government and co-ops.

Most housings in the Soviet Union were formal, built and provided by the government. The Private Sector encircled the informal sphere of self-built structures. The government largely withdrew from the Private Sector legally and economically. The government’s involvement was limited to providing utilities on site and oversight over transactions. Beyond that, people in the Private Sector could build anything they wanted, so long as it resembled a private residence. Because individual funds were limited, people had to come up with creative and often shared structures, unusual use of materials, and unorthodox planning.

The Private Sector exists to this day, but the term evolved to describe a largely informal city block with low-rise construction. There you can see housing ranging from informal to formal, from hundred-year-old huts to modern houses, from communal to private, from single-family residences to multi-family apartments, with businesses, community gardens, and farms sprinkled all over.

The Private Sector is the most diverse city block typology in Russia. It stubbornly resists any regulatory efforts and often ignores the rules and laws imposed on it. As an old Russian saying goes: the severity of Russian laws is mitigated by the fact that obeying them is optional.

Private Sector in Voronezh

The best way to picture the Private Sector in my hometown Voronezh is to imagine something between the slums of Mumbai and American suburbs.

On one end, the Private Sector boldly cuts into the formal city fabric and sprawls all the way to State Capitol (site map below). It has access to all utilities on-site, from the internet to sewage. It’s directly adjacent to the formal economy, business, and government services: multiple schools and colleges, two state universities, a military academy, a large sporting facility, and even a rocket factory.

On the other end, the Private Sector has a plethora of grey-market services (unregistered, untaxed, but otherwise legal businesses such as tailors, mechanics, and farm markets). All housing is self-built and self-improved. There are no architects, engineers, or code officials in sight. Therefore, the look and styling of the Private Sector are as you’d expect: charming, but only on a sunny day.

This merger of formal and informal plays a critical role in the Russian economy. Russian economy fell off the cliff with the fall of the Soviet Union and has never reached the pre-fall GDP per capita since. Hundreds of thousands lose their ability to live in a formal place or be employed in a formal economy every year. The Private Sector remains the only place to weather the economic storm and one of the few remaining social lifts. The Private Sector’s combination of proximity to the formal economy (and formal wages), cheap housing, social support network (although ever diminished by the government), and grey market services gives people the best chance to survive, escape poverty, and enter (or re-enter) the formal economy.

My family represents one of such lucky cases. The informal architecture of the Private Sector helped us to navigate the economic collapse of the 90s (that’s two collapses ago) and come out on the other end as middle-class. The Private Sector and my closely-knit extended family allowed me to finish public high school in acceptable conditions, get a public higher education, and become an architect in the formal economy after years of informal gigs and odd jobs.

Below is the selection of places my family and I inhabited over the years.