it might be some kind of a city, and this is true in part

May 6, 2021 9:08 AM

A Monotown (monocity, моногород), is a local community dominated by a single company. There are a lot of them. Their architecture is often striking.

(via Angela Chen on twitter.)

posted by eotvos (14 comments total)

(One of these days, I'll learn how to spell architecture.)
posted by eotvos at 9:10 AM on May 6, 2021 [1 favorite]

See also, Company Town in the US.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:13 AM on May 6, 2021 [2 favorites]

The Soviet definition of “monotown” is if 20% or more of inhabitants are employed in a single industry. By this definition, many towns in the US not considered company towns qualify. This is a useful term, thanks for bringing it here.
posted by q*ben at 9:49 AM on May 6, 2021 [3 favorites]

Well, this is clearly not re-purposed Tartarian stuff.
posted by Naberius at 10:54 AM on May 6, 2021 [5 favorites]

Some but not all post-Soviet monotowns are turning into ghost towns as their single industry vanishes. The most famous of all ghost-monotowns, the queen of them all, is Pripyat, built in 1979 as a model atomgrad for the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, famously abandoned 32 years ago last Tuesday.
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 10:58 AM on May 6, 2021 [1 favorite]

Loving the photography! https://alexanderveryovkin.com/14252314 has more.
posted by travertina at 11:24 AM on May 6, 2021 [1 favorite]

How much of the "eastside" of Seattle--Redmond, Bellevue, Kirkland, Woodinville, etc.--is part of a Microsoft monotown?

Is there a similar term for places like Detroit which are/were monotowns to particular industries and not actual single companies?
posted by maxwelton at 11:52 AM on May 6, 2021

See also, Company Town in the US.

The difference seems to be that monotowns are dominated by one company/industry, while a company town is largely built and owned by the company and is operated as a private compound. Ironically, given the Soviet roots of the term, it seems like the modern capitalist dream is a monotown on paper, company town in practice, where the town is controlled by the company but they're not actually responsible for anything.
posted by star gentle uterus at 12:24 PM on May 6, 2021 [3 favorites]

This is great.

I once spent a summer living in the Soviet monotown of Zelenogorsk. It was a closed monotown, built for nuclear plant workers & their families during the cold war. It has since opened, and I recall some recent commercial developments that injected part of the city with an air of (relative) modernity, but the core of the city shared the architecture featured in the FPP links.

Hard to describe just how much the monotonous, overwhelmingly rectilinear architecture toys with your mind. I generally have a good sense of direction, but other than the main commercial strip of town, and the manicured boulevard leading up to the administrative offices, I couldn't tell one part of town from another. It was all rectangles -- sometimes angling this way or that based on the footprint of a building, sometimes different shades of grey, sometimes two or three rows deep. But, always rectangles.

Contrast: travelling out of town, through small villages on the steppes with houses bearing traditional woodwork, or into the city of Krasnoyarsk, which has plenty of classically-influenced architecture. In comparison, the monotown architecture just screams "utilitarian settlement" from every indistinguishable corner. And it only takes a couple of weeks, tied to this city, amidst the unbelievably vast Siberian countryside, to begin sensing a distinct claustrophobia.

I don't wish to make it sound frightful or inhospitable! The wonderful people I met made, by far, the biggest impression on me and my time there. Stories abound of the friends I made there and the adventures they pulled me into. They shared with me the hidden charms of their city, and for sure I carry that with me today, too. But, probably more than any other place I've travelled in my life, that monotown architecture affected me in a visceral way.
posted by Theophrastus Johnson at 2:40 PM on May 6, 2021 [7 favorites]

I'm going to throw this out there... We have these in the USA. Have you been to Plano TX lately? Scottsdale AZ? There are places in the US where the mega churches settle in, where everything looks exactly the same. The same businesses on every corner, the same builders built all the houses. The same bars, the same fast food, the same home improvement stores. Movie theaters are all owned by the same company and there will always be a sports complex, and it will always look the same as the sports complexes in the other cities.

I used to do some lighting work for a megachurch in Dallas, when we travelled to other cities to work on other "campuses" it was like we had never left Dallas...
posted by WalkerWestridge at 3:32 PM on May 6, 2021 [5 favorites]

Fascinating, Theophrastus Johnson. I've never been to any of these towns, and I've only ever spent a few weeks in Eastern Russia, mostly in big cities, as a tourist. My first thought on seeing the samples of the photos in the last link was, "that looks just like almost everything in Krasnoyarsk." (And even lot of stuff more than five blocks from the river in Irkutsk.) It's interesting to hear the opposite perspective from someone who's lived there. Perhaps one difference is that you know there *is* a city center close by, even if you can't see it.

I'm pretty fond of both the big apartment block style and surrounded courtyards. It's awesome for kids. But, they do make for a pretty unwalkable city when they're block-sized. I've also never been more lost than in industrial neighborhoods in the region. I just assumed it was my fault.
posted by eotvos at 10:34 PM on May 6, 2021 [1 favorite]

@WalkerWestridge
My friend who lives in Houston gave me a virtual tour of the city the other day, and, relative to my own, which is a fair bit older but not extremely so, it had this sort of feeling. Everything was a strip mall, bungalow, sad, weird, two-to-three story apartment complex, or some kind of commercial business or industrial zone. Looking at the city from the sky and seeing how it'a all oil infrastructure, asphalt, and meagre private greenspace was depressing.
posted by constantinescharity at 1:05 AM on May 7, 2021 [2 favorites]

I sold my soul to the etc.
posted by k8bot at 7:45 PM on May 7, 2021

How much of the "eastside" of Seattle--Redmond, Bellevue, Kirkland, Woodinville, etc.--is part of a Microsoft monotown?


I'd believe the whole Greater Seattle area is a software monotown. I have a suspicion that the biggest difference between Washington's Coronavirus response and New York's was that Amazon and Microsoft between them have the power to shut the city down. And they used it the moment there was a confirmed case in an Amazon office because they know darn well almost none of their employees actually need to be in their offices to get work done.
posted by Zalzidrax at 10:06 PM on May 7, 2021 [2 favorites]