Urban Legends

Catherine the Great wanted to build a new urban landscape. The empire responded.

(Sort of. Eventually.)

Empress Catherine II, who ruled Russia 1762-1796, was a planner. She planned to build a new Russia. An enlightened Russia. An empire without rival. An empire with expansive borders and a robust urban landscape. She knew what she wanted to create and she knew (though perhaps not well enough) that the land she governed bore little resemblance to the vision in her mind. 

Catherine's medium was the written word. (Yes, she also communicated through large quantities of rubles and, occasionally, banishments to Siberia). She articulated her vision of Russian towns - what they would look like, and what life in them would be like - in a series of decrees.

But it isn't easy, even for an empress as formidable as she was, to build cities out of words. Catherine needed plans. 

And so, between 1766 and 1831, provincial officials - and/or agents of the Commission on the Building of St. Petersburg and Moscow - produced and filed plans for 385 different towns located within the borders of the tsarist empire. Catherine approved 277 during her reign; Alexander I and Nicholas I approved the rest. Eventually, they were collected and published in 1839 in a supplementary volume of the Complete Collection of Russian Laws (known to its rabid fans as the PSZ, or Pol'noe Sobranie Zakonov).

The volume includes 416 plans (30 towns were mapped more than once). They have been digitized and made available by the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg, and copies can be found in major libraries across North America.

Together, these plans constitute the sourcebase for the "Urban Legends" project. They both maddening and extraordinary. We can't get enough of them. So far, we gave extracted the legend texts, built a database, and created a set of interactive visualizations. The next phase of the project involves spatial analysis. More on that soon.

As much fun as it is to play with the vizzes, we imagine that many of you will want to examine the plans themselves. So here they are. Use the search box at upper right if you have a particular town in mind. Otherwise, we have organized them according to province (see below). We even went to the trouble of annotating some of them: if you do not read Russian, you might want to start here.

Each plan has its own page. On it you will find metadata, the plan image, a map showing the location of the town, and a high-resolution viewer. If the plan has been annotated, the annotations will be available in this viewer. 

Start by exploring one of these annotated plans...

1. Kaluga (Kaluga Province)
2. Maloiaroslavets (Kaluga Province)
3. Yekaterinoslav (Yekaterinoslav Province)
4. Aleksandrovsk (Yekaterinoslav Province)
5. Bakhmut (first edition, Yekaterinoslav Province)
6. Bakhmut (second edition, Yekaterinoslav Province)
7. Mariupol' (Yekaterinoslav Province)

... or flip through the plans for each province.

Check back often - the lists of annotated plans and provincial collections will grow by the week. Scroll to the bottom of the plan page to find the annotated edition. Once there, we recommend using the arrow button in the upper right corner of the navigation bar to open the full screen view.

Why do these plans deserve your attention? Follow the stories on Twitter! @ImperiiaProject #TownPlans

Collection Tree