Embeddedness of Informal Settlements in the City: the Case of Sochi Garage Cooperatives

Garage cooperatives are a common problem in Sochi. The analysis in this paper shows that more than 50,000 people live there, which is about 10% of the city population. Despite land use conflicts, garage owners dispose buildings as legal property: they sell it, rent it to tourists, use them as commercial spaces for small businesses (car service stations, cafes, restaurants, hairdressers, grocery shops). Garage cooperatives tend to expand and compact, and the city administration does not prevent it. The city does not have a coherent development program for its settlements and some of them are generally ignored as built-up areas. The purpose of this final qualification work: to assess the current situation of garage settlements - the most vulnerable and pronounced form of unauthorized construction - in urban planning documents and their typology by level of integration into the urban space. The main results of the work are: (1) Systematization of approaches to study the integration of informal settlements into the urban space and conceptualization of the core concepts; (2) Development of a methodology to assess this integration; (3) A unique database on residential garage cooperatives in Sochi; (4) Assessment of the scale of transformation of garage cooperatives in Sochi and the estimated number of people who live there; (5) Assessment of the overall position of residential garage cooperatives in the spatial structure of the city and territorial planning documents.