Urban comfort in peripheral cities: between strategic vision and embodied practice Olga Ustyuzhantseva, Sofia Prokopova, Svetlana Usenyuk-Kravchuk Polar Geography, 2026 This article examines how the concept of urban comfort is articulated in official planning frameworks and experienced by residents in Russian Arctic cities. Focusing on Novy Urengoy and Tarko-Sale, we analyze strategic documents, master plans, and ethnographic data to reveal a persistent gap between technocratic visions of comfort and the embodied, relational ways it is practiced in everyday life. While policy documents emphasize visual modernization and infrastructure, residents highlight care, coping, recovery, and informal social infrastructure as key to comfort. The study demonstrates that Arctic urbanism requires attention to seasonal rhythms, bodily needs, and differentiated user capacities, especially those of women and the elderly. We propose reframing comfort as a political and social achievement rather than a design output. This perspective contributes to critical urban studies by situating the Arctic as both a peripheral and generative site for rethinking livability, justice, and planning in climatically extreme environments.
Unfreezing the City: A Systemic Approach to Arctic Urban Comfort Sofia Prokopova, Svetlana Usenyuk-Kravchuk, Olga Ustyuzhantseva Architecture, 2025 The urban landscape of the Russian Arctic, shaped during the Soviet era of extensive urbanization, embeds narratives of colonial appropriation and serves as the foundation for ongoing urban development. In light of climatic, political, and social uncertainties, design disciplines must navigate the balance between environmental sustainability and the varied needs of residents, requiring a systemic approach to design. This study combines theoretical analysis with qualitative field research conducted in two Western Siberian cities (Novyy Urengoy and Tarko-Sale), including interviews, mental mapping, and systematic observation of urban life. Analysis of the collected data revealed significant challenges in current urban design practices, particularly regarding weather protection, seasonal adaptation, and social space creation. The proposed model constitutes a pioneering initiative in domestic Arctic urban research, aiming to conceptualize a context-sensitive approach to urban environmental formation, thereby challenging prevalent universal/mainstream methodologies and establishing a theoretical framework for future applications. Our theoretical model synthesizes representations, perceptions, and materiality, conceptualizing the architectural environment as a context-sensitive “life-support module”. This conceptualization emphasizes that successful Arctic urban design must emerge from specific local contexts rather than universal solutions, as demonstrated by our analysis of residents’ spatial practices and adaptations to extreme conditions. We reference media studies to analyze urban materiality as both an artificial construct that mediates perceptions of the immediate surroundings and as a generative force that actively shapes meanings, practices, and sensations. Our findings indicate that current standardized approaches to Arctic urban development often fail to address local needs and environmental conditions, suggesting the necessity for a fundamental shift in design methodology. Given that the urban realm is a fundamental component in shaping individual and collective perceptions, this conceptual shift has the potential to significantly influence prevailing societal views of the “empty” and “hostile” Arctic.
BEYOND THE PHYSICAL: CONCEPTUAL MODEL OF INTANGIBLE COMFORT IN RUSSIAN ARCTIC CITIES and Sofia Prokopova New Design Ideas, 2025 Larger than similar settlements in other polar countries both in terms of climatic extremes and population size, the Russian Arctic city is a unique phenomenon - a product of the Soviet period of colonial urbanization. Its architectural environment does not provide a comfortable everyday interaction (physical and emotional) for citizens with the natural and artificial environment. At the same time, modernist utopian ideas, transformed under the influence of the urban mainstream, still largely determine the present and future of Arctic architecture in Russia. The current paper presents a theoretical model that conceptualizes the urban lived space as an object of architecture. The notion of lived space is based on Lefebvre's idea of space production and is seen as a phenomenological field in which architecture, context and individual perception are in empirical interaction. The proposed model attempts to integrate the key factors of Arctic urbanism into a coherent system, including aspects of the human-city nexus, such as year-round soft mobility and emotional perception; the challenge to the colonial view of the region and the potential of architecture to establish a strong human-city relationship.
Warm architectural environment of the Arctic city: model of sensitive adaptation Sofia Prokopova ACM International Conference Proceeding Series, 2023 Deprived of evolutional development, the architectural environment of ‘planned’ soviet cities in the Arctic were retrieved from the ‘mainland’ part of the country as a sign of the region's ideological appropriation. To this day the Russian arctic urban realm lacks sensitive adaptation and responsive mechanisms, which would naturally occur under long period of gradual adaptation. In our concept the notion of organic architecture unfolds in the process of the urban environment's adaptation to the Arctic city's space. The main idea is that this adaptation concerns all levels of the space — natural conditions as well as social, cultural and psychological. Such a complex analysis makes it possible to achieve a true organic and sensitive fusion of artificial space together with the natural, social and individual ones. The Warm City concept is a PhD research project aimed to elaborate a theoretical model of architectural spatial formation of the built environment of the Russian Arctic city.
Urban comfort in peripheral cities: between strategic vision and embodied practice O Ustyuzhantseva, S Prokopova, S Usenyuk-Kravchuk Polar Geography, 1-16 , 2025 2025
Unfreezing the City: A Systemic Approach to Arctic Urban Comfort S Prokopova, S Usenyuk-Kravchuk, O Ustyuzhantseva Architecture 5 (2), 27 , 2025 2025 Citations: 1
Beyond the physical: Conceptual model of intangible comfort in Russian Arctic cities S Prokopova, S Usenyuk-Kravchuk, O Ustyuzhantseva New Design Ideas 9 (1), 77-101 , 2025 2025 Citations: 2
Materiality and Representation in Architectural Environment of the Arctic city S Prokopova Anglia Ruskin Research Online (ARRO) , 2024 2024
Warm architectural environment of the Arctic city: model of sensitive adaptation S Prokopova Proceedings of the 15th Conference on Creativity and Cognition, 35-38 , 2023 2023
Arctic Urban Environment: Human Dimension and Design Dimension SM Prokopova Proceedings of ARCTD 2021: Arctic Territorial Development, 243-251 , 2022 2022
The concept of a “warm” city in the arctic: Basic ideas of comfort in the urban environment (the case of Western Siberia, Russia) S Prokopova Техническая эстетика и дизайн-исследования 3 (4), 22-28 , 2021 2021 Citations: 6
Городская среда Арктики: оптимизация и цифровизация СМ Прокопова, СГ Кравчук, НП Гарин Академический вестник УралНИИпроект РААСН, 40-44 , 2021 2021 Citations: 20
Дизайн для Севера: вахта как метод работы и образ жизни СМ Прокопова Актуальные проблемы архитектуры и дизайна: материалы всероссийской научной, 404 , 2019 2019 Citations: 1
ПРЕДМЕТНО-ПРОСТРАНСТВЕННАЯ СРЕДА ВРЕМЕННОГО ПОСЕЛЕНИЯ В УСЛОВИЯХ ВАХТОВОЙ РАБОТЫ. SM Prokopova, NP Garin, SG Kravchuk Architecton: Proceedings of Higher Education/Architecton: Izvestia Vuzov , 2019 2019
Предметно-пространственная среда вахтового поселения как фактор адаптации СМ Прокопова Фундаментальные и прикладные научные исследования: актуальные вопросы … , 2019 2019 Citations: 1
Предметно-пространственная среда временного поселения в условиях вахтовой работы СМ Прокопова, НП Гарин, СГ Кравчук Архитектон: известия вузов, 14-14 , 2019 2019 Citations: 1
MOST CITED SCHOLAR PUBLICATIONS
Городская среда Арктики: оптимизация и цифровизация СМ Прокопова, СГ Кравчук, НП Гарин Академический вестник УралНИИпроект РААСН, 40-44 , 2021 2021 Citations: 20
The concept of a “warm” city in the arctic: Basic ideas of comfort in the urban environment (the case of Western Siberia, Russia) S Prokopova Техническая эстетика и дизайн-исследования 3 (4), 22-28 , 2021 2021 Citations: 6
Beyond the physical: Conceptual model of intangible comfort in Russian Arctic cities S Prokopova, S Usenyuk-Kravchuk, O Ustyuzhantseva New Design Ideas 9 (1), 77-101 , 2025 2025 Citations: 2
Unfreezing the City: A Systemic Approach to Arctic Urban Comfort S Prokopova, S Usenyuk-Kravchuk, O Ustyuzhantseva Architecture 5 (2), 27 , 2025 2025 Citations: 1
Дизайн для Севера: вахта как метод работы и образ жизни СМ Прокопова Актуальные проблемы архитектуры и дизайна: материалы всероссийской научной, 404 , 2019 2019 Citations: 1
Предметно-пространственная среда вахтового поселения как фактор адаптации СМ Прокопова Фундаментальные и прикладные научные исследования: актуальные вопросы … , 2019 2019 Citations: 1
Предметно-пространственная среда временного поселения в условиях вахтовой работы СМ Прокопова, НП Гарин, СГ Кравчук Архитектон: известия вузов, 14-14 , 2019 2019 Citations: 1
Urban comfort in peripheral cities: between strategic vision and embodied practice O Ustyuzhantseva, S Prokopova, S Usenyuk-Kravchuk Polar Geography, 1-16 , 2025 2025
Materiality and Representation in Architectural Environment of the Arctic city S Prokopova Anglia Ruskin Research Online (ARRO) , 2024 2024
Warm architectural environment of the Arctic city: model of sensitive adaptation S Prokopova Proceedings of the 15th Conference on Creativity and Cognition, 35-38 , 2023 2023
Arctic Urban Environment: Human Dimension and Design Dimension SM Prokopova Proceedings of ARCTD 2021: Arctic Territorial Development, 243-251 , 2022 2022
ПРЕДМЕТНО-ПРОСТРАНСТВЕННАЯ СРЕДА ВРЕМЕННОГО ПОСЕЛЕНИЯ В УСЛОВИЯХ ВАХТОВОЙ РАБОТЫ. SM Prokopova, NP Garin, SG Kravchuk Architecton: Proceedings of Higher Education/Architecton: Izvestia Vuzov , 2019 2019
