Rooftop Exploration and the Creation of Alternative Spaces in St. Petersburg

ABSTRACT

This article investigates the ways in which power relations structure urban public space and privilege certain behaviors, while marginalizing others, and how these structures are resisted by young people through the creation of alternative spaces on the city’s rooftops. It examines the activity of “roofing” in St. Petersburg, a popular youth-culture practice of urban exploration, investigating the factors that have enabled the widespread flourishing of this activity, despite its illegality. The article explores how the rooftops offer a distinctive realm for the youth in modern-day St. Petersburg to defy authority; reestablish their rights to the city; and counteract the escalating social, economic, and political control that has come to define Russia’s public sphere during Putin’s reign.

Urban exploration is an increasingly popular activity all over the world and has been defined as recreational trespass or, more precisely, “the exploration of TOADS (temporary, obsolete, abandoned, and derelict spaces)” (Paiva 2008, 9).¹ Roofing, also known as rooftopping, is one such practice and refers to the recreational trespass of a city’s rooftops.² Practitioners are known as roofers, in Russian, rufery. Although still less popular than other urban activities such as parkour and skateboarding, the popularity of urban exploration has increased exponentially over the past two decades, especially among young urban populations, and quickly spread from its birthplace in Toronto (rejected by urban explorers from San Francisco who contest this origin) into a global phenomenon (Garrett 2013a). In a few short years, urban exploration spread from its birthplace in North America to Russia, particularly taking root in St. Petersburg, where roofing has, since 2000, come to play a large part in the city’s youth cultural scene. Here the activity of roofing has been popularized and transformed into a significant cultural practice, its popularity coinciding with the gradual reversal of the freedoms that had been accumulated during perestroika and the early post-Soviet period and a tightening of social control that has characterized the public sphere in Russia under Vladimir Putin, who has been president since 2000.

This article examines the phenomenon of roofing in St. Petersburg, shedding light on the complex interplay between power, urban space, youth culture, and resistance. It offers valuable insights into the ways in which marginalized groups actively navigate and subvert the dominant power structures in their quest for autonomy and the right to shape their urban environments. Alternative urban spaces are created in response to the challenges that confront urban actors (Fisker et al. 2019). In this paper, I interrogate the ways in which the rooftop has been appropriated by St. Petersburgers as an alternative space over the course of the city’s history, helping them to find their place within the urban environment and respond to one of the primary challenges they face within the city: access to public space. Through its examination of the activity of roofing, this paper highlights the constraints placed on young people in contemporary Russia and the possible processes of resistance to these, contributing knowledge on the unofficial spaces of youth culture and inquiring into the processes that have allowed St. Petersburg to emerge as a prominent center for rooftop exploration. For the purpose of my analysis, I understand young people as those who were born in the 1990s and grew up in Putin’s Russia, coming of age during the country’s evolution toward authoritarianism. This is, however, also influenced by the Russian Federation’s policy on youth, in which youth is defined as aged fourteen to thirty (Ministerstvo obrazovaniya nauki Rossiskoi Federatsii 2014). Initially, my research was focused on the accounts of eight roofers, ages 23 to 28. They were all young men, born and raised in St. Petersburg, who began roofing while they were teenagers, still at school. While these remained my core group of participants throughout the research process, I was introduced to others, who I met and interacted with less frequently, as I used snowball sampling as a method of gaining more contacts engaged in the activity of roofing.³

While there is a burgeoning literature on urban exploration, there is little examination of this type of urban practice within the Russian context. This is because much of the literature on urban exploration has focused on the cultural processes at work and the subculturalization of the activity but has given little consideration to the different processes that take place globally and in the local context, which influence the development of culturally specific forms of activities such as urban exploration. For example, the legal status of roofing in St. Petersburg is very different from the situation in both the United Kingdom and the United States, where urban explorers have been prosecuted using antiterrorism laws and on conspiracy to commit further crimes, most commonly vandalism (cf. Kindynis 2017). To understand how and why roofing has become popularized, it is therefore vital to investigate these cultural processes and local power dynamics to understand why this particular activity has been able to take root within the city. In the Petersburg context, these include the specificities of the process of marketization that the city underwent during the post-Soviet transition period and the increased social and political control in Russia under Putin. This has resulted in both a decrease in the amount of publicly available space across the city and an increase in the regulation within those spaces that are public. I investigate why, given these limitations, roofing has not been subject to the same degree of regulation as other urban activities, despite its illegality. This article, through an investigation of roofing, therefore, makes a contribution to our understanding of the ways in which power relations organize and structure urban public space and privilege certain behaviors, while marginalizing others, and how young people may seek to challenge and resist these structures.

A Framework for the Study of Rooftop Exploration

Within the literature on cities, relatively little has been written about the roof as a location within the city, indeed it is often not considered a space at all.⁴ Instead, it is thought of merely as the upper covering of a building, shielding those within from any inclement weather. As such, the roof is an inherently ambiguous space within the urban landscape, lending itself to the creation of a liminal space in which the roofers can alter their perceptions and create new understandings of the built environment. Arnold Van Gennep’s observations on rites of initiation (1960) and Victor Turner’s work on ritual (1974, 2009) have proved crucial to my understanding of liminality as both a process and a quality of ambiguity in which certain norms are suspended. This has provided a framework according to which we may examine roofers’ attempts to free themselves from the prevailing systems that govern the uses of urban space. Liminality is an aspect of both the pursuit of roofing, as an activity that challenges the normative usage of the cityscape, and the ambiguous character of the rooftop space, which lies at the heart of my discussion. This liminality provides an explanation as to why rooftop exploration is granted a higher degree of tolerance than other activities that take place across the cityscape.

The rooftop has long afforded St. Petersburg’s residents the opportunity to create liminal spaces for informal social interaction and to critique their role within and access to the city’s public sphere. In Jürgen Habermas’s seminal work, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989, 2), he describes the emergence of the public sphere as a specific domain in contrast to the private, which can be traced back to ancient Greek origins. In the ancient world, the public sphere was born in, but not exclusive to, the agora—the marketplace; Habermas (1989, 5) asserts that the public sphere could also be constituted in both discussion (lexis) and in common action (praxis).⁵ Thus, the public sphere was a realm for social interaction in which democracy could be enacted. However, while the public sphere may claim to be a democratic arena, it is in fact intrinsically a hegemonic space, shaped by the power structures that are disseminated throughout a society. In Russia, the hegemonic state dominates the public sphere, creating a monolithic realm in which there are strict rules regarding behavior in a public space. In the post-Soviet era, the Russian public sphere has been subject to commercialization and political and socioeconomic domination, becoming a site for consumer culture as well as a site for political and economic elites to exert control over the population. This, as Elena Chebankova (2011, 320) asserts, “acts as a backbone of modern Russian consumerism and fosters the public aversion to politics.” Throughout this paper, I explore the ways in which these economic and political forces have driven young Petersburgers away from the city’s public spaces and encouraged them to seek alternative spaces on the rooftops.

While the Habermasian conceptualization of the public sphere views it as a discursive arena for political participation, as Low and Smith (2006, 5) describe, “The public sphere remains essentially ungrounded while public space discussions insufficiently connect to meditations on the public sphere.” I am interested in the interaction between the politics of the public sphere and the materiality of urban public space. In this vein, I have been influenced by the work of scholars such as David Harvey and Don Mitchell, who adopt a physically situated understanding of the public sphere and urban politics (Harvey 2005; Mitchell 2003). Indeed, Mitchell’s understanding of an idealized “open” public space that functions to unite political movements and create more inclusionary uses of public space has been particularly fruitful in my understanding of roofers’ attempts to democratize the St. Petersburg cityscape through their exploration. I utilize roofing as a lens through which to examine both the composition of urban public space and citizen’s access to it and the activities that are tolerated within those city spaces that are designated as public. I am interested in how urban space and the spatial relations within it may function to subjugate or liberate citizens from the state and other sources of power. This critical engagement with the ways in which local places are shaped by hegemonic and exclusionary policies and discursive practices is what Setha M. Low (2011, 390–91) terms “spatializing power”—that is, “studying culture and political economy through the lens of space and place [which] provides a powerful tool for uncovering material and representational injustice and forms of social exclusion.”

Michel Foucault (1991) argues that disciplinary power structures are inseparable from the organization of space, controlling behavior and the distribution of bodies within that space. Public spaces are permeated by subtle applications of disciplinary power exercised for the purpose of inducing certain types of behavior within those who occupy certain spaces (Dovey 1999; Foucault 1991, 2020; Massey 2009). In particular, the meanings associated with certain types of public space encourage and privilege certain behaviors while marginalizing others. These spaces are embedded within power relations that promote conformity to ideologized standards of public order (Lefebvre 1991, 1996; Zukin 1995). These power relations are materially embedded within the space, through the placement of walls and fences among other structures and obstacles that are used to control movement and bodies and promote normative behavior. The city prescribes a particular way in which it should be used, establishing rules for normative use by imposing how to interact in an embodied way with the built environment.

Radical ways of engaging with the city, of which roofing is one, can be understood as attempts to take greater control over the social production of urbanized space (Garrett 2013b). As with other forms of urban exploration, the practice of roofing can be understood as a spatial practice in which power is negotiated, challenging the prescribed and socially accepted uses of the city. Rooftop exploration challenges the dominant power relations that organize and structure urban public space and privilege certain types of behavior within it. Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space (1991) greatly informed my understanding of the forms of inequality inherent in the built environment and how cities function as sites for commodification. Lefebvre (ibid., 193) sets out various kinds of space in the city that mediate certain actions and relations: accessible space, forbidden territories, places of abode, and junction points. The materiality of the city customarily dictates that the roof is a forbidden territory; however, it is a space that the roofers are attempting to make accessible through their trespass. They are using the city in a way that was not intended and, in doing so, they are creating a new type of space with material conditions different from those encountered during normative interactions with the city. Lefebvre’s work allows us to reconceptualize space as a complex and multidimensional social product and process; as a medium of social control; and as a site of contestation, negotiation, and (re)appropriation.

As a significant youth cultural practice in St. Petersburg, roofing highlights the complex relationship between young people’s identity and place. It is evidence of the many-faceted interaction between social relations and urban space, the dimensions of which include neighborhood identities, leisure, and issues of public and private. By examining the ways in which young people in St. Petersburg create alternative spaces for themselves, roofing offers a lens through which to investigate how young Petersburgers respond to power in the contemporary city and the role that the cityscape plays in processes of inequality and exclusion.

Methodology

This article uses the activity of roofing as a lens through which to examine the relationship between space and power in the contemporary Russian city. I adopted a multimethods approach, incorporating a range of qualitative methods, including ethnographic methods, such as participant observation and semistructured interviews, historiography, and analysis of cultural sources. This methodology allowed me to investigate both the status of the rooftops in contemporary Petersburg and the cultural processes, which have taken place over the course of the city’s history, that have influenced the development of the activity of roofing in the city.

This methodological approach was greatly influenced by the work of Geertz (1965), who promoted a mutually beneficial relationship between history and anthropology in his essay History and Anthropology. Geertz’s work on cities (Geertz 1965, 1979, 1990) combines an analysis of social behavior with historical context in order to investigate the spatial dimensions of local identity, the trajectories of his study sites, and the legacies those sites have inherited (Geertz had a particular interest in the effects of colonialism in certain locales). This interaction between anthropology and history has been influential to the development of this study and to my methodological framework. Moreover, history also plays a role in roofers’ own narratives of the practice. As Bradley Garrett writes, urban explorers “engage in a practice intensely interested in locating sites of haunted memory, seeking interaction with the ghosts of lives lived” (2011, 1049). Although it is beyond the scope of this article to discuss this element of the practice in depth, through roofing, the roofers gain an appreciation of the city’s historical architectural forms, creating encounters with the city’s past that they would otherwise never experience.

I examine how and why the activity of roofing has emerged as a uniquely St. Petersburg form of urban exploration, developing within the context of global forms of the activity and, crucially, influenced by the materiality of the cityscape and the city’s history of its residents spending their leisure time on the rooftops. Investigating the different ways that St. Petersburgers have been able to appropriate the city’s rooftops, I focus on the marginality of this space, describing how it has provided a space for informal encounters, notably the rooftop hangout of the late Soviet underground in the 1980s, which has conditioned the development of contemporary roofing activities. Against the backdrop of social and urban changes in the post-Soviet era, which have increasingly excluded many of the city’s residents from accessing space across the city, informal leisure practices create more democratic opportunities for St. Petersburgers to take control of the social production of urbanized space.

To unpack the ways in which spatial practices are both constitutive of and conditioned by the network of social forces that structure individual existences, I examine the practice in St. Petersburg as a uniquely local activity, which is influenced by the historical spatial, social, and cultural factors unique to the city and the repercussions these processes have for the social production of space in contemporary St. Petersburg (for more on urban exploration generally see Daskalaki and Mould 2012; Garrett 2013a, 2013b; Kindynis 2017). I then explain why this activity has been able to flourish across the city despite its illegality: The rooftops provide a unique space for young people in contemporary St. Petersburg to resist control and reclaim their place in the city in spite of the increasing social and political control that has been characteristic of Russia under Putin since 2000 but in particular since his return to presidential office in 2012.

A Particularly Petersburg Form of Trespass

St. Petersburg, rather than any other city in Russia, has become a hub for roofers. In the words of journalist Igor’ Naidenov (2008), “An almost exclusively Petersburg pastime … they climb roofs everywhere, of course, but nowhere except Petersburg is it possible to move freely in the space between the earth and the sky.” This is influenced by the unique spatial and material features of the cityspace. St. Petersburg is historically a horizontal city associated with spectacular panoramas, punctuated by the city’s golden cupolas, spires, and raised bridges. It is a city with a lot of rooftop space, which has long been valued by artists. It is this horizontal skyline that contributes to the city’s romantic character in Russia’s imagination, immediately recognizable as depicted in paintings and on postcards. The city is associated with horizontality, thanks to restrictions on its upward development (a matter that has become particularly contentious since the end of the Soviet era and the expansion of private property rights).⁶ The city’s materiality has become a central feature of its visual identity such that its depiction often takes a form that mirrors the landscape itself—the panorama (Karas 2022a). Works such as Fedor Alekseev’s Vid na birzhu i Admiralteistvo (“View of the Stock Exchange and Admiralty,” 1810) and Arkhip Kuindzhi’s Vid Isaakievskogo sobora pri lunnom osveshchenii (“St Isaac’s in the Moonlight,” 1869) helped to cement the iconic nature of the St. Petersburg landscape and later contributed to the movement to preserve the horizontality of the skyline and its iconic panoramas in a reflexive process.⁷ The roofs have, in many ways, become central to the image of the city both locally and globally as Russia’s imperial and “cultural capital.”⁸ The skyline demonstrates the flamboyance of the city’s imperial architecture, with its gold domes and spires that have become synonymous with the city.

Roofing sees small groups or individual practitioners temporarily appropriate the spaces of the city’s rooftops, gaining access through courtyards and stairwells and, in extreme cases, by freeclimbing. The city’s roofs provide the perfect location for urban exploration as they are, by and large, unused and undetermined spaces within the city: In the eyes of roofing’s practitioners, they are spaces filled with inexhaustible potential. The unique physiognomy of the Petersburg cityscape lends itself to the exploration of the city’s rooftops. The historically strict height restrictions have impacted the city’s vertical development, creating a midrise city, with buildings located in the historic center, all of relatively equivalent height. Additionally, although roofers are drawn to the city’s upper reaches by the promise of spectacular views, the materiality of the roof space is somewhat unspectacular. St. Petersburg’s roofs are, mostly, easily traversable, with a gentle incline, reinforcing the horizontality of the Petersburg skyline and standing in contrast to the vertical dominants which have become iconic features of the cityscape.

Each roofer I spoke with generally had a favorite rooftop spot. These were not the spires or extremely risky sites that roofers occasionally explore and that are featured on their social media profiles.⁹ Rather, they tended to be commonplace and unspectacular rooftop sites, offering views of the city’s domes and panoramas. One roofer’s favorite roof was located on Troitskii prospekt overlooking the Troitskii-Izmailovskii Cathedral (12 October 2019); another favored a rooftop on the Griboedov Canal with views of the city’s central landmarks, including the Church of the Savior on the Blood, the Kazan Cathedral, and the Admiralty (March 2, 2020). From these locations it was possible to appreciate the iconic skyline, but from relative comfort and safety, allowing the roofers to spend more-sustained periods of time on the rooftops. This contrast between the city’s golden domes and spires and the quotidian rooftop forms is underscored by the materiality of the metal sheets that cover the roofs, which are often rusted, providing grip, and making the surface easy underfoot (while newer roofs might be more slippery). Roofers adjust to the different surfaces of the rooftops by walking on the joints between the sheets of metal (October 15, 2019). Seasoned roofers instinctually adjust their footing accordingly, taking into account the many variables of the roofs’ surface, such as the steepness of the slope and the evenness of the surface. As one roofer (June 3, 2017) described:

When you first start your legs shake and you walk so slowly, but after a while you become more confident. You need to be bold and put your feet down confidently. It’s safer that way. The more you come up here, the easier it becomes. You start to understand the roof. I know where to go, where to put my feet. If the roof is slippery, I walk on the joints between the sheets of metal, if not I just go where I please.

Although much of the practice is concentrated in the historic center, noted for its imperial architecture, many roofers including the participants in my study live in the city’s peripheral districts such as Kupchino, Parnas, and Okhta. Several of my participants live in Kupchino—a Soviet-built dormitory suburb at the southernmost point of the city. Kupchino is a neighborhood in the Fruzensky district of St. Petersburg, a name used locally for the district itself.¹⁰ As the crow flies, Kupchino is relatively close to St. Petersburg’s center, a 30-minute metro ride into the city center; however, it is the last stop on the metro line and the area feels isolated from the rest of the city: It is bounded to the north by Prospekt slavy, a large thoroughfare, to the east by the main railway line to Moscow, and to the west by the railway line to Vitebsk in Belarus. These lines clearly demarcate the boundaries of Kupchino, physically cutting it off from the surrounding areas and, indeed, the city as a whole. Kupchino is both part of and distinct from the rest of St. Petersburg.

Kupchino’s distance and alienation from the center is often noted. The roofers who live there often refer to the neighborhood jokingly as Rio de Kupchino or KNR (Kupchinskaya Narodnaya Respublika) to denote its foreignness, remoteness, and isolation from the rest of the city.¹¹ When considering the spectacular visual register of the city’s panoramas, this is contrasted with the materiality of Petersburg’s outlying areas which are often associated with the gray tower block of the Soviet era. Many consider the featureless midrise of Khrushchoby to have become a symbol for the city’s postindustrial suburbs, a visual metaphor for life in these districts, which the roofers see as lacking in opportunity, and it stands in sharp contrast visually to the gilded domes and spires of the city center that draw my participants up to the city’s roofs.¹² It is interesting to note that the roofers are not people who have any sort of automatic claim to the city center and, as I will go on to discuss, they often feel economically excluded from it, but they are able to use the practice to contest their place within the city. There are clear spatial differences between the areas in which my participants, like many roofers, live and the area in which their activities are concentrated. It is an activity that seemingly takes place away from their normal lives. Roofing is a set of creative strategies that allow the roofers to critique their position within the city space, including the divisions between peripheral districts such as Kupchino and the city center. Thus, roofing subverts the normative structure of the city by moving not only vertically from ground level to the roof but also horizontally from the periphery into the center.

Influenced by both the city’s spatiality and the materiality of its unique roofscape, which makes the city’s rooftops easy to traverse, St. Petersburg has a history of the city’s residents going up to the rooftops that predates the development of urban exploration as a popular leisure activity in the 21st century. This has influenced the development of roofing and is, thus, crucial for understanding the development of roofing in its contemporary form and the role it plays in its practitioners’ lives.

Tracing Roofing’s Roots: The Soviet Rooftop Hangout

The Petersburg rooftops have a tradition of providing space for communication and a means of escaping observation and control. Although the boundaries of public and private have changed over the course of the city’s history, the emergence of roofing as a specifically Petersburg pastime has been conditioned by residents’ attempts to reclaim control over the social production of urban space in the face of the social, political (and, of late, economic) constraints that determine access to the public sphere.

Despite the rationality and control that defined urban planning during the Soviet era, citizens had the capacity to create liminal spaces for social interaction in informal areas of the city space (Engel 2007, 289). Corresponding to the rise in the communal flat as the primary form of urban housing, the rooftops provided a space for citizens of all ages.¹³ They afforded people a rare opportunity for privacy and a chance to relax and sunbathe, in what little open space was available to them, on the city’s rare sunny days. This use of the rooftops continued throughout the Soviet era, evident in films from the local studio Lenfilm, including for instance, Vitaly Mel’nikov’s Mama vyshla zamuzh (“Mama got married,” 1969) and Arkadii Tigai’s Lokh – pobeditel’ vody (“Lokh – Victor Over Water,” 1991). It is an activity that persists to this day, with one local resident asserting, “Everyone has always done it. Sunbathing on the roof is the most common activity.”

However, perhaps the greatest change to the use of the city’s roofs came in the late Soviet period, when domestic space was reclassified as private (as expressed in the emergence of the family apartment as the primary form of new housing). Order in the common parts of apartment blocks continued to be the responsibility of all tenants, but these changes resulted in ambiguity over who bore responsibility for the communal spaces of apartment blocks. As Caroline Humphrey has observed,

There was no mediating space in Soviet Russia between the public and the private, no space of conventional socialization; you were either in the space of official decorum or in the nooks of domesticity. Any other space, like the stairwells or backyards of apartment blocks, was a space of alienation, belonging to everyone and no one, and often a hangout for drunks and strewn with rubbish and graffiti (2002, 212; in reference to the work of Svetlana Boym).

This stark polarization is reflected in Viktor Krivulin’s memoir Okhota na mamonta (“Hunting the Mammoth”) when he writes, “Gate-entrance-staircase, the entrance to private life, this is where it all spilled out—apartment scandals from inside, car horns and the rattle of trams outside” (Krivulin 1998, 43).

The creation of communal liminal spaces across the city facilitated social interaction outside of the restrictions of institutional time and space. As Alexey Golubev (2020, 91–92) has written in his work on the pod”ezd (the entrance staircase, which is often referred to as the paradnaya in St. Petersburg):

By spending their leisure time in these spaces, these groups challenged attempts by the state bureaucracy and intellectual elite to rationally organize Soviet society both in spatial (urban planning) and temporal (leisure activities) terms.

As was common within these marginal spaces, in the late Soviet era (in the 1970s and 1980s), the rooftops became a place for informal gatherings and where unofficial communication could take place. The rooftops became a key site for members of the late Soviet underground to create space, outside of both the official sphere of work and private domestic life, and as such the rooftop contributed to the creation of alternative lifestyles.

In the last Soviet decade, the rooftop of Akvarium singer Boris Grebenshchikov’s apartment, at №.5 ulitsa Sof’i Perovskoi (known until October 1918 and from October 1991 as Malaya Konyushennaya ulitsa), became a space for informal gatherings of members of the Leningrad underground rock music and art scene. Grebenshchikov (often known simply as BG) lived in a top floor communal apartment, so the rooftops were easily accessible. In Joanna Stingray’s memoirs of her visits to Leningrad throughout the 1980s, where she spent time with many of the city’s underground rock musicians and met her first husband, Yuri Kasparyan (guitarist of Kino), she notes several instances of being on the roof of BG’s apartment¹⁴ (Stingray and Stingray 2020). Photographs taken by her sister Judy, who accompanied Stingray on trips to the city throughout the decade, show the group hanging out on the rooftop, which had views of both the Church of the Savior on the Blood and Kazan Cathedral (Stingray and Stingray 2020, 76–77, see also 90). Stingray’s accounts underscore the importance of the roof as both a site of privacy and safety and as a social space that facilitated meaningful interaction between her and her friends—the collective creation of an alternative “little world” (Stingray and Stingray 2020, 185). The rooftops allowed Soviet citizens such as BG, Viktor Tsoi, and Yuri Kasparyan to socialize with foreign citizens (Stingray and her sister Judy) as well as to jam to Western music by artists such as Chuck Berry and the Grateful Dead. The rooftop offered distance from the constant surveillance and control as such activities would have at best been frowned upon and at worst caused serious social problems had they been conducted within the walls of the kommunalka.

The inaccessibility of the rooftops was central to the appropriation of the roofs by figures of Leningrad unofficial culture at this time. The use of the rooftops, as opposed to other spaces such as stairwells or courtyards, as a space for socialization reflects increasing legislative control over the behavior of young people in the late Soviet era in response to a growing concern over the negative influence of the street on youth behavior (Belaya 1987). In Leningrad, the city council attempted to take control of this perceived issue through the adoption of new legislation designed to regulate young people’s behavior within public spaces and to stamp out what they saw as an increase in delinquency.¹⁵ However, this did not extend to the roof as, despite being a common space, it was outside the public domain.

Creating Alternative Spaces: From Rooftop Socialization to Exploration

Roofing in its contemporary form differs from the late Soviet rooftop hangout as it involves the exploration of buildings in which the roofers are not residents—BG, Stingray, and friends socialized on top of Grebenshchikov’s apartment building. There is greater emphasis on the ability to traverse the roofscape, navigating from roof to roof, which is facilitated by the horizontality of the Petersburg skyline, with many buildings of similar height situated side-to-side. This has seen a shift in focus from socialization to navigation, thus aligning the activity within the broad range of activities that fall under the urban exploration umbrella. Bradley Garrett has described how urban exploration works “to take place back from exclusionary private and government forces to redemocratize spaces urban inhabitants have lost control over” (2013b, 4). Roofing can be understood as a response to the social and spatial inequalities inherent within contemporary St. Petersburg, which emerged as a result of the city’s marketization and securitization during the transition era. In the post-Soviet period, there has not only been a reduction in the quantity of publicly owned space within the city, but the space that has been designated for public use (whether privately or publicly owned) is subject to surveillance and exclusionary regimes determining who can and cannot use these spaces freely.

As in the Soviet era, when the rooftops provided a liminal space outside of the communal flat, in the post-Soviet era the enduring lack of specifically designated youth spaces outside of the family home has meant that young people continue to spend their leisure time in marginal, functional spaces in the city. Moreover, many of the informal social and creative spaces of the late Soviet era have become institutionalized and now function for profit.¹⁶ While there has been a reduction in freely accessible space for social interaction citywide, the rooftops still exist in large quantity. Roofers I spoke with told me that they had initially turned to roofing while still teenagers (in their final years of school) precisely because of the need for spaces of social contact and “you know, it’s somewhere to go, something to do” (September 16, 2019). The roofers talk about their own practice as being inherently democratizing and a critique of what it means for space to be public, especially given that, despite being private property, St. Petersburg’s liminal rooftop spaces are, by and large, unused. They see no harm in what they are doing and view these spaces as unappreciated and going to waste. Through the appropriation of the rooftop spaces, the roofers feel as though they are managing to undermine the system and take back control for themselves.

Once up on the roof it is possible to explore the city space, expanding the possibilities of the city and allowing roofers to create a new critical understanding of the built environment. The roof is a liminal space: It is “neither here nor there” (Turner 2009, 95). By heading to the city’s roofs, the roofers enter an ambiguous zone in which they can alter not only themselves but also the built environment. Liminality is a time and a place where the normal modes that govern sociality are suspended; it is a “moment in and out of time.” The performance of roofing disrupts normative patterns of both time and space as the roofers engage with the city in a radical way (ibid., 96). One roofer (May 19, 2017) described the sensation of being on the roof as “quiet above the noise” and another (August 28, 2019), as “absolute calm,” suggesting that some sort of suspension of reality can be achieved through the activity. Roofing is thus a disruption of not only the spatial modes of the city, but the temporal: The practice of roofing functions as a performative shift in which its practitioners are able to negotiate their role in and relationship toward society in an invisible liminal space. Moreover, their relationship with the roof is marginal in temporal as well as spatial terms, as they inhabit it for short periods of time.

The activity forces its participants to view the city in an entirely new way by giving roofers new vantage points not accessible to the majority of the city’s residents. They are constantly keeping watch for open gates and doors and any opportunity that might lead them up to the rooftop: “I check every gate I pass to see if it’s open […] it’s Sod’s law, if I don’t check one, it will be open […] and I wouldn’t forgive myself for that” (October 31, 2019). The roofers attempt to gain access to the city’s domes and spires by any means necessary, approaching the city in creative ways, exploring not only the city’s rooftops, but also the city’s courtyards and staircases, which they pass through to gain access to the roofs.¹⁷

Although the terrain of the St. Petersburg roofscape lends itself to exploration, roofing is a physically demanding activity: Once a roofer has gained access to a roof, they must be prepared to scale walls and evade other obstacles, such as barbed wire and telephone or electricity cables. The roofers choose their clothing accordingly: comfortable, not so formfitting as to restrict movement but not so loose as to get caught on anything, with sensible footwear to grip to the surface of the roofs. Roofing involves a much greater degree of mobility to move around on the rooftop than it does to simply walk around the city’s streets. Tim Edensor in his work on the exploration of abandoned industrial sites (2005, 834) describes how urban exploration “[demands] a fuller performative, corporeal engagement with space.” When discussing their activities, roofers highlight the sensory experiences to be gained from roofing and the embodied nature of its engagement with the built environment.¹⁸

As an embodied practice, roofing expands the notions of the city through creating new sensory experiences of the built environment. The spaces created on the city’s rooftops act as a liminal arena in which the roofers’ who engage in this practice are able to create a ludic appreciation of space through the reconfiguration of both bodily and architectural form. In this way, roofing can be linked to other established spatial practices that engage with the city in creative ways, including the Situationist concept of the dérive.¹⁹ In the 1950s, Guy Debord, a founding member of the Situationist International, wrote, “The modern spectacle depicts what society could deliver, but in doing so it rigidly separates what is possible from what is permitted” (Debord 2006, 14; emphasis in original). Similarly, roofers attempt to test the limits of what is possible, both in terms of the physical limitations of the urban environment and the legal prohibitions on the activity. Moreover, in his work on urban exploration, Bradley Garrett (2013b, 4) asserts that urban exploration is, in fact, an escalation of such practices in an attempt to democratize urban spaces. In this way, roofing is a strategic mode of practice that contests notions of public and private, what is possible and what is permitted, through the creation of illicit and inherently ambiguous spaces on the city’s rooftops. This allows those who participate to critique the boundaries of permissible practice within the city and contest the processes of marketization and securitization that have become features of the post-Soviet St. Petersburg landscape.

Navigating the Marketization and Securitization of the Public Sphere

The end of state socialism and the ensuing economic challenges had profound sociopolitical and spatial consequences. In the post-Soviet era, there has been both a reduction in the quantity of publicly owned space in the city, and that space that has been designated for public use (whether privately or publicly owned) is subject to surveillance and exclusionary regimes determining who can and cannot use these spaces freely. Anna Zhelnina (2011) notes in her work on shopping centers in St. Petersburg that, since the collapse of state socialism, attempts to create public spaces have largely served to reinforce social boundaries, subjecting those who are outwardly identified as “other” to increased regulation within these zones. The increase in consumption uses of such spaces and the encroachment of private organizations into formerly public space has allowed for better maintenance and security, factors that alter paying citizens’ expectations of what behavior is and is not appropriate within these spaces.²⁰

Throughout the 1990s, as the city transitioned to a market economy, St. Petersburg’s public spaces came to be defined by privatization and commercialization. In the 1990s, consumption came to be characterized by the appearance of kiosks and small vendors; the early 2000s then saw the rise of the torgovyi tsentr (shopping center) to the extent that by the end of the decade St. Petersburg had more shopping centers than Moscow (a city more than double its size; Zhelnina 2011, 57). This has meant that in St. Petersburg the public sphere is fully accessible only to the most economically advantaged. As Rowland Atkinson notes, within spaces such as shopping centers, “non-consumption is a form of deviance,” a matter exacerbated by an institutionalized sense of mistrust and anxiety directed toward young people (Atkinson 2003, 1834; see also Peter Kelly 2003). Much of the moral panic regarding youth activity is focused on teenage behavior that is perceived to be “anti-social”—that is, threatening to public order.

The visibility of young people, as a social group, in the city and the perception that they are a potential social threat, place them at the forefront of debates over the use of public space (Feixa, Leccardi, and Nilan 2016). The increasing privatization and regulation of public space, encourages the exclusion of young people who are seen to be a disruptive presence, and therefore they are marginalized and precluded from using public space freely. This is a matter underscored in the work of Gill Valentine, who has described how public space is “not produced as an open space, a space where teenagers are freely able to participate in street life or define their own ways of interacting and using space, but is a highly regulated—or closed—space” (Valentine 1996, 214). Thus, young people, such as the roofers, must pay to “open” up and legitimately spend their leisure time in these spaces and avoid the suspicion and regulation that comes with socializing in spaces across the city, which are frequented by other Petersburg residents.

The constraints placed on the use of public urban spaces as sites for leisure dictate what constitutes appropriate leisure activities for young people and where this leisure can appropriately take place (Madanipour 2003). The forces of privatization and commercialization have meant that for young St. Petersburgers the cost of spending time in the city center is often exclusionary: The roofers frequently comment on the high cost of leisure in the central city, from the cost of a coffee to a complaint that “on Nevsky, all there is to do is shop” (March 6, 2020). They also expressed a general sense of dissatisfaction at the activities available to them, acknowledging that, while they were at school, they had more opportunities for organized recreation available to them (October 12, 2019). This corresponds with the findings of Baranov et al. who note that young people in Russia are not satisfied with the available culture and leisure facilities and tend to avoid formally organized recreation (Baranov et al. 2020). Among their interests outside of roofing, active recreational activities such as skateboarding and cycling, along with watching television, playing video games, and just “hanging out” with friends were the activities chosen by roofers to occupy their leisure time. This exclusion of young people from much of the city’s space has meant that young people find alternative spaces within the city to spend their time, free from regulation.

In his work on urban exploration in London, Bradley Garrett (2012, 6) asserts that the “right to spatial freedom in reaction to [the] escalating securitization of everyday life [and] perceived subjugation” is the primary motivation behind urban exploration. This is also a motivating factor for St. Petersburg’s roofers, who view their navigation of the city space as both the discovery of overlooked areas of the city and the appropriation of spaces that have not yet undergone the capitalistic appropriation and repackaging for the market that has dramatically altered access to urban space in the post-Soviet era. In contrast to the so-called public spaces in the city, such as shopping centers, which they feel excluded from despite their being legally accessible, the exploration of the St. Petersburg rooftops explores the implications of places that are “open” and “public.”

In the post-Soviet era, this securitization of the city’s space has, in many places, also appeared in residential buildings, evident in the addition of gates, fortified doors, and domofony (intercom systems). Olga Shevchenko (2009, 113) describes how in Moscow the introduction of these systems “operated as universal buffers that served to exclude and neutralized the failures of state-run structures and institutions.” However, as Becker, Mendelsohn, and Benderskaya (2012, 81) have observed, in St. Petersburg it is the newly built post-Soviet residential communities outside of the center, rather than the city’s older apartment buildings concentrated in the historic core, that are “characterized by modern, high-rise apartment buildings, lush lawns, security systems and shiny playgrounds.”

From both the assertions of roofers and my own observations of St. Petersburg, doors and gates across the city continue to be left open, and many of those that do have electric domofony can be bypassed with universal key fobs, bought easily and cheaply online. According to one roofer (October 14, 2019), a door that is locked is also no issue: “If you give the door a quick and hard pull, it’ll probably open.” This difference may be explained by the persistence of communal living in central St. Petersburg, where people continue to live in larger communities than the single-family unit: Approximately 20 percent of St. Petersburg’s population still live in communal flats, and an additional 10 percent in obshchezhitie (Bater 2006; Zhilishchnii Komitet 2018; Petrostat 2019).²¹ Thus, securitization, in the words of Shevchenko (2009, 116), as a means of fostering “a feeling of independence from larger economic and political upheavals by placing control over the household’s well-being into the hands of its members” may not be practical or realistic in the Petersburg context, where society is less atomized and there are potentially dozens of residents of all classes living in a single building. Accordingly, residential properties—that is, the spaces that constitute the private sphere, remain much more accessible for the city’s roofers than those spaces that are designated “public.”

Trespass and Tolerance in Putin’s Russia

Roofing as a form of trespass is prohibited and is criminalized according to Article 139 of the Russian Criminal Code (Gosudarstvennaya Duma 1996). Nevertheless, in St. Petersburg, roofing is shown a high degree of social tolerance and its practitioners are at little risk of prosecution. The laws that prohibit roofing are rarely enforced, and police do little to prevent the activity or deter those who practice it. The existing punishment for roofing is generally a fine of between 500 and 1,000 roubles (about the same as the fine imposed on fare-dodgers on public transport), which is rarely imposed and has little deterrent effect (Interviews, September 26, 2019, and November 2, 2019). One roofer (May 16, 2017) described authorities’ view of the roofers as more of a minor nuisance than any real criminal or security threat: “The cops won’t bother us. We’re not annoying anyone. Sometimes they fine us 500 [roubles] but they don’t want the hassle and usually let us go.” However, in a later interview, he changed his tone, portraying himself and other roofers as outlaw-type figures who are changing the rules of some sort of game played between urban explorers and the authorities but one that the roofers are, in fact, winning:

We make the rules of the game. They say that it is impossible to climb there, but it is possible. There’s no stopping us … Even if the police try, they can’t. Everything is against us. Locks, barbed wire […] but if we get up there, we win (June 13, 2017).

Here the roofer minimizes the risk from the police, asserting that it is in fact the roofers who are in control of the situation, not the authorities. He employs the idea of doing something nel’zya no mozhno (that which one shouldn’t but can).

Moreover, the inaccessibility of the space (for all but the roofers) is a factor in roofing’s ability to resist control. One roofer (March 3, 2020) asserted that while the police might attempt to crack down on the activity, “They’d have to catch me first,” and another (June 13, 2017) compared the relationship between roofers and authorities to the Soviet cartoon Nu, Pogodi!²² Such a suggestion presents roofing as a game of cat and mouse, where the authorities are in constant pursuit of the roofers, who are mostly able to evade capture. Further, while the roofers express a general disdain for authorities, often boosting their position as outlaw figures, in reality the relationship between the roofers and police is much more ambivalent. This is reflected in the idea that police simply “don’t want the fuss” (November 2, 2019). Indeed, in the words of the city’s largest online forum for roofers Otkrytye kryshi Sankt-Peterburga, “The police will respond to a call unenthusiastically, they don’t like going out onto the roof, and they are even less enthusiastic about trying to run out on the roof and catch you” (‘Otkrytye Kryshi Sankt-Peterburga’ 2020). The roofers view the risk of prosecution as minimal, and the fact that roofing has become so widespread and prominent within the city’s youth culture provides further evidence to support this view.

Despite the increasing social and political control that has been characteristic of the Russian public sphere under Putin and that has gained pace since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, roofing continues to be granted a high level of social tolerance both by the authorities and by residents. Ellis Cashmore (1990, 92) has asserted that “the ways in which people ‘let off steam’ mustn’t violate the standards that have become accepted by society at large.” I believe that the tolerance generally extended to roofing in St. Petersburg can to a degree be attributed to a lack of political assertion on the part of most of its practitioners. While it is, undoubtedly, a form of spatial critique, it is both less explicitly political and nonconfrontational in its form of action than other practices, such as political protest, that take place within the public sphere.

During the early years of Russia under Putin, Russian society was marked by increasing “de-politicization,” whereby, everything “political—whether pro-regime or anti-regime—was rejected by the people who instead withdrew into the private sphere” (Erpyleva and Magun 2015). This has led to what many believe to be widespread alienation and apathy among the populace. Moreover, as Mischa Gabowitsch (2016, 171) has asserted, Russians have a “narrowly political understanding of protest,” whereby, more-abstract forms of social critique are often not included within the scope of what is considered to be protest.²³ While responding to the increasing restrictions that have been placed on their everyday lives over the past ten years, many of the participants showed an ambivalence to party politics and expressed views that were neither explicitly pro-Putin nor anti-Putin. It is interesting that this type of trespass has been able to flourish even as the Putin regime has sought to “curtail public expression in the name of suppressing extremism; restrict civil society and stigmatize civic activism as foreign-sponsored and anti-Russian; and protect so-called Russian values” (Lanskoy and Suthers 2013, 81). While less explicit than other forms of political expression or protest, roofing can be understood as a means of contesting one’s place within the built environment and as an attempt to take greater control over the social production of urbanized space. This has become particularly pertinent since February 24, 2022, as the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been accompanied by a further dismantling of Russia’s civil society and civic life. Although many of its participants would want to distance themselves from any explicit political enterprise, I would contend that roofing is neither ambivalent nor apolitical for the reasons stated above.

In the Putin era, which has seen a return to authoritarianism, it is logical that the informal uses of the city’s rooftop spaces have reemerged, as in the Soviet era. Indeed, the growing ideological control exerted over the public sphere has, as described by Vladimir Sorokin (2009), encouraged a return to certain unofficial practices: “In the era of highly developed Putinism, people have started to remember the underground. Many things have fallen apart and changed in the last couple of decades, yet some things have remained the same and many other things have crept back.” The rise of urban exploration globally since the turn of the new millennium, and the expansion of roofing as a St. Petersburg pastime has, in Russia, coincided with this gradual reversal of freedoms over the past two decades.

The moralizing discourse that has been characteristic of Putin’s Russia, especially since Putin began his third term as president, places emphasis, not on the total elimination of immorality, but rather on the purification of the public sphere: This has been evident in the increased intolerance toward homosexuality and the discourse on eradicating homosexual “propaganda” from the public sphere that coexists with the absence of a legal ban on same-sex relations of the kind that existed in the USSR after 1934 (Healey 2017). The new morality discourse of the Putin era centers on protecting children, holding them up as symbols of moral purity that need to be protected. Much of the moral panic regarding youth activity is focused on teenage behavior that is perceived to be “anti-social”—that is, threatening to public order. As an activity that takes place in the ambiguous rooftop space and away from the majority of the city’s residents, roofing is not within the scope of lawmakers’ concerns.

Despite its subtly political nature, the ambiguous nature of the roof allows the activity to avoid the same degree of regulation as other activities performed in the public space. An important element in the perception that roofing, as it is carried out by most practitioners, is politically harmless is the liminal space in which this activity takes place. Roofing does not challenge official values as it is, by and large, unseen by the majority of the city’s population. It is crucial that roofing is a largely invisible activity within the city. Roofing does not challenge official values as it is, by and large, unseen by most of the city’s population. The city’s roof space is not utilized by those who use the city in a normative way.²⁴ It is, I would argue, because the roof space is not considered a public domain in the full sense that the authorities do not attempt to crack down on the activity.

The ambiguous space in which roofing takes place helps to explain why the punishment for roofing is relatively insignificant and, thus, is scarcely a deterrent, when compared, for example, with the legislation introduced in 2022 penalizing the distribution of “fakes” concerning the Russian government’s military actions abroad, including its “special military operation” in Ukraine: This penalty includes fines of up to five million roubles and prison terms of up to fifteen years for those convicted under this new law (Gosudarstvennaya Duma 2022).²⁵ While serving to critique young people’s access to public spaces across the city, roofing neither explicitly challenges authoritative or political discourse nor is a confrontational practice, unlike demonstrations with banners and ribbons or graffiti, whose main goal is to visually disrupt the city space. Graffiti, when intended to confront and shock its viewer, is a form of political communication intended to disrupt the visual language of the street and to superimpose a new language on top of the built forms (Kindynis 2018). In 2020, two St. Petersburg students were charged with terrorism for stenciling anti-Putin graffiti forty times across the city (Chto takoe politicheskii vandalism: 40 raz nanesti na istoricheskie doma Peterburga portret Putina s chlichem smerty 2020; Lebedeva 2020). This again contrasts with the treatment of roofers, who are largely allowed to continue the activities unchallenged as long as their actions remain nonconfrontational and within the ambiguous space of the rooftop. Thus, it is both the space and the content of their actions that contribute to the tolerance granted to roofing. When roofers do take part in graffiti practice, it is so far up the building (in the ambiguous rooftop space) as to become merely proof of their presence on the rooftop (September 26, 2019). It is a form of communication intended for other roofers, an audience already literate in that particular visual language, not for the general public.

However, although roofing, as it is practiced by most roofers, is not considered “political,” it is possible for the activity to move into the realm of political action or even protest. On the night of 19-August 20, 2014, in the week leading up to Ukrainian Independence Day, four roofers were arrested after they painted the Soviet star on top of the Kotel’nicheskaya Embankment Building in Moscow in the Ukrainian colors, blue and yellow, and attached a Ukrainian flag to its apex (Artprotest.org 2015). However, a fifth roofer, who was involved in the action and goes by the alias Mustang Wanted, escaped prosecution as he had fled to Ukraine. This was a clear act of solidarity with Ukraine in response to Russian military intervention in Donbas and the illegal annexation of Crimea. This action was seen as deeply unpatriotic, and the four arrestees were charged with hooliganism and vandalism. The crimes that these roofers were charged with could be applied to many of roofing’s participants who often engage in graffiti practice on the roof; however, for the most part they are left alone.

The key difference between the Kotel’nicheskaya Embankment Building action and roofing as it is most commonly practiced, is that of visibility versus invisibility. In the Kotel’nicheskaya Embankment Building case, the roofers visually confronted the city’s users through their choice of landmark and the painting of the star. The reason the activities of the Kotel’nicheskaya Embankment Building roofers gained so much attention was that they were more closely related to the aktsiya (action, but also in the sense of actionism, or art activism) of art protest groups than roofing as it is practiced by most practitioners: The roofers used visual symbols to disrupt the city space and to impact the lives of the city’s users.²⁶ This type of protest action enables those participating to occupy space and materialize a sociopolitical issue through performance to attract the attention of the viewer and raise awareness of a particular issue. It is notable that no such rooftop actions have taken place since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The use of performance to create political or cultural scandal, while a form of protest, bears no resemblance to the tactics used by roofers who often move through the city unseen and for whom such attention would be detrimental, as it would make it impossible to gain access to the spaces they occupy. Rather, the roofers have used the rooftop has a space of escape, away from the realities of their everyday lives. They employ the rooftop as a space away from (rather than to engage with) political discourse and outside of the regimes of control and surveillance that have become emblematic of Russia under Putin. This, alongside the lack of any explicit political motivation on the roofers’ part appears to have prompted the apparent social tolerance of roofing in St. Petersburg; if it were interpreted as a threat to hegemonic power, it would be requisite for the law-enforcing bureaucracies to suppress it. This appears to count much more than the fact that roofing is de jure forbidden.

Conclusion

The phenomenon of roofing serves as a powerful lens through which we can understand the constraints faced by young people in the city and their strategies of cultural resistance. The hegemonic nature of the Russian public sphere, characterized by political and socioeconomic domination, has driven young Petersburgers away from traditional public spaces and toward alternative spaces on the rooftops. While roofing is influenced by the particular materiality of the St. Petersburg roofscape and spatial divisions within the city, its popularity is indicative of the increasingly restrictive realm of public life in Russia. It also draws on the city’s history of unofficial culture and creation of alternative spaces by its residents, most notably in the late-Soviet era, in an attempt by young Petersburgers to free themselves from the prevailing systems that govern the uses of urban space. The findings of this study contribute to our understanding of the complex interplay between power, public space, and youth culture. Moreover, they shed light on the evolving nature of urban governance in Russia and the ways in which young people creatively respond to and challenge these dynamics.

In contemporary St. Petersburg, the public sphere has become monolithic, both in socioeconomic and political terms, excluding young people from full and equal participation in the city’s daily life. This hegemonic public sphere has led to subaltern groups, of which young people may be understood to be one, seeking alternative spaces in which to interact and articulate their wishes. The roofs provide the city’s young residents with space for leisure and sociality. As a liminal space, the rooftop offers young Petersburgers a means to create new autonomous spaces away from everyday city life, affording them opportunities that they may be denied elsewhere. Roofing thus becomes a transformative act that empowers young people and challenges their exclusion from the public sphere. This has become increasingly important in Putin’s Russia, which has seen young people excluded from and retreating away from the public sphere, as a result of both the commercialization and regulation of the city’s space. It is these factors that have helped the activity to grow and thrive in St. Petersburg.

Against the backdrop of increased conservatism and surveillance within public spaces, it seems paradoxical that an activity such as roofing should be allowed to persist, given its associated dangers and issues of criminal responsibility. I propose that roofing has been allowed to flourish, while other behaviors such as protest have been marginalized, because it is not viewed in the mainstream as a form of political action. This is evidenced by the harsh responses by the authorities when roofers do transgress into the realm of the political. This, therefore, goes some way to illuminating what is or, rather, is not considered transgressive behavior in contemporary Russia. Instead, roofing as it is most commonly practiced serves a more subtle role in young people’s lives, allowing practitioners to deflect the power that governs the public sphere and take back a degree of control by creating inclusive spaces in the urban landscape. It is this aspect that constitutes the activity of roofing as a practice of resistance. Through the appropriation and reinterpretation of the liminal rooftop space, the roofers are empowered to take control over the power relations within public urban spaces from which they feel otherwise excluded.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was partially supported by the CEELBAS-Arts and Humanities Research Council CDT.

Notes

1. For a description of TOADS in the American context see Greenberg, Popper, and West (1990).

2. I have elected to retain the term roofing, rather than use rooftopping, as this is a transliteration of the Russian word used by its practitioners for the activity and is entirely comprehensible in the Anglophone context.

3. The data constituting this article were collected during three field trips to St. Petersburg conducted in-person in the summers of 2017 and 2019 and the spring of 2020 and online thereafter as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic (for more on this see Karas 2022b). As I will describe, roofing has an ambiguous legal status and for this reason all data have been anonymized. REC2 Ethics approval granted by CUREC, number: R64109/RE001.

4. For example, Victor Buchli’s sophisticated and detailed study of Moscow’s Narkomfin building (a prototype of Soviet avant-garde accommodation designed by Moisei Ginzburg) makes little note of the recreation space and garden originally planned for the building’s rooftop (Buchli 1999). The scant literature largely focuses on planning and the potential future development of the rooftops rather than on the ways in which ordinary citizens engage with the roofs in their day-to-day lives.

5. I draw from Habermas’s conception because of its widespread impact on normative understandings of the public sphere. It should, however, be noted that Habermas insists on the bourgeois nature of the public sphere; in his conceptualization, the public sphere is threatened by the nonbourgeois strata of society accessing it. This highlights the exclusionary nature of Habermas’s concept of democracy, which lacks consideration of class and gender and, thus, the inclusion of subaltern classes in the democratic public sphere (cf. Calhoun 1992).

6. Although the city’s height restrictions have been historically strict, temporary height restrictions on new development began to be put in place in 2004. These were concretized in policy in 2009. Amendments came into force that prohibited construction higher than 28 meters, or the height of the Winter Palace’s cornice. These new height restrictions also forbid buildings lower than 23.5 meters in height in order to preserve the illusion of an unbroken, low skyline. However, given the relatively new nature of these regulations, there are historic buildings as well as lacunae, which drop below this height, disrupting the idea of a single uninterrupted skyline (Karas 2022a).

7. St. Petersburg’s architectural preservation movement emerged as a distinct local movement at the beginning of the twentieth century, motivated by the increasing diversity of the city’s architectural forms (Clark 1995; Maddox 2015).

8. The city was first labeled Russia’s “cultural capital” by Boris Yel’tsin in a 1997 television address.

9. While it is beyond the scope of this article to discuss fully the role of social media in the practice of roofing, the online presentation of roofing is certainly important to the activity and has played a role in the formation of roofers as a distinct community in the city and in the relationship of the St. Petersburg roofing community to the wider global urban exploration community. Given the use of roofing as a means of challenging young people’s access to public space, it is important to consider the ways in which the emergence of networked technologies and mediated communicative platforms made available by the Internet and mobile phones have changed the use and understandings of public space (Dean 2003).

10. According to the 2021 Russian census, Kupchino had a population of 56,617, while the Fruzensky district recorded a population of 416,570 (‘Itogi vserossiiskoi perepisi naseleniya’ 2022).

11. This name predates the establishment of the Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics in Eastern Ukraine by Russian proxy forces and instead references both the People’s Republic of China and Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in Russian Kitaiskaya Narodnaya Respublika (KNR) and Koreiskaya Norodno-demokraticheskaya Respublika (KNDR), respectively.

12. Khrushchoby is a blending of Khrushchev’s name with the word for slums, trushchoby.

13. Diary entries from the 1930s and later reveal that the roof became a realm for children outside of the communal flat. While the city’s courtyards had been the main location for children’s socialization and play since the late nineteenth century, the inclusion of the roof space within leisure at this time may be linked to what Kelly determines as an increase in risky preoccupations among children and adolescents from the late 1920s and onward (Kelly 2007). This is underscored by Piir, who notes that the exploration of sites around the home included not only the woodsheds and hidden corners of the yard but also the attics and cellars (Piir 2006).

14. Born Joanna Fields, she legally adopted her stage name, Stingray, in 1987.

15. As Bogatyreva writes, this was blamed on the reclassification of private domestic space. It was argued that young people were not prepared for the responsibility of life outside of the communal apartment, which lacked the social control of life within the communal flat. Leningrad, however, continued to have a high number of communal apartments, particularly in the city center where Grebenshchikov’s apartment was located. This is true even today. Further, Alexey Golubev has written of attitudes toward youth delinquent behavior: “Soviet officials and ordinary citizens did not differentiate between the material and social aspects of deviant behavior among Soviet teenagers. Acting as spontaneous materialists, they recognized the power of stairwells and other public places to grant Soviet teenagers a negative social agency—negative from the perspective of Soviet authorities” (Bogatyreva 1990; Golubev 2020, 103).

16. For example, Pushkinskaya-10, which began as an artists’ squat, is now one of St. Petersburg’s most venerable arts centers. While among its functions is still a “self-governing creative commune,” today it houses the Museum of Sound (Muzei zvuka), thirty-eight artists’ workshops, galleries, a library, theater, café, and “mini-hotel” (‘Art-Tsentr Pushkinskaya-10’ 2021).

17. Catriona Kelly (2014, 127) has written that by taking shortcuts through the city’s courtyards, Petersburgers “were engaged in a constant process of familiarizing their landscape, of placing themselves and others upon it, of creating relationships between their own small territory and the larger city world.”

18. For more on the relationship between roofing and gender see Karas 2022b.

19. For many roofers, exploration is less about drifting through the city than with the dérive and, instead, places emphasis on the exploration of undiscovered sites or accessing the landmarks that are iconic features of the cityscape.

20. Despite the sweeping changes that have taken place in the city since the introduction of the private property market and the commercialization of the city space, the limitations placed on the use of publicly usable spaces are not too dissimilar from the control exerted over public space throughout the Soviet era, when undesirable groups, including the homeless, were excluded from these spaces.

21. This number has been steadily decreasing since the 1990s as the municipal authorities have taken action against the city’s kommunalki.

22. Nu, Pogodi! (in English, Well, Just You Wait!) is a Soviet cartoon series, first produced by Soyuzmultfilm in Moscow in 1969. Each episode follows the adventures of Wolf (Volk), as he tries to catch Hare (Zayats), who manages to elude Wolf. At the end of each episode Wolf usually declares the phrase, “Nu, Zayats … Nu, pogodi!” (“Well, Hare … Well, just you wait!”), which gave rise to the series title.

23. Although overt political protest has been limited across Russia since a wave of large-scale protests from 2011 to 2013, it is important to note that Russia does have a history of local, social protest. Recent examples include the 2017 strike by long-haul truckers against the raising of platon (a road tax) and the 2019 landfill protests in Arkhangelsk Oblast and the Komi Republic, calling for the resignation of the respective governors over plans to relocate waste from Moscow to the regions. However, while these local issues are of civic importance they are not viewed in the same light as national protest movements, or those that challenge the state and Putin’s political regime, as they are for the most part self-contained. In St. Petersburg, architectural preservationism and snow clearance are issues that are capable of garnering public support and focusing criticism of the city’s governance under Aleksandr Beglov (Karas 2022a).

24. Historically it was only the workers who maintain the roofs in a professional capacity and the al’pinisti, who clear snow and icicles off the roofs in the winter months who were granted access to the city’s rooftops.

25. The limits set out by the research ethics approval granted for this research and the disparity in legal status between the activity of roofing and repercussions for “discrediting” the “special military operation” has precluded me from including any information regarding roofers’ opinions on the Russian invasion of Ukraine in this article. Although I have taken steps to avoid the identification of my participants, in the case that they are identifiable as a group of roofers, I have chosen not to provide any potentially incriminating details regarding their stance toward Russia’s military activity abroad.

26. The rooftops have been used as the site of various explicit protest actions over the past decade including Pussy Riot’s 2011 rooftop performance Smert’ tyur’me svobodu protestu! and an October 2014 performance, Otdelenie, by artist Petr Pavlenskii, at which he cut off his own ear on the roof of the psychiatric hospital Institut imeni Serbskogo.