I am not the first urbanist to write a book about a city and focus disproportionately on a small area in the historic center at the expense of a vast outer ring of urban development. The center always draws those who love cities, has more history, more variety, and more action per unit area, and disproportionately distinguishes the city from other cities. But the zones beyond the center are important, too, and we now turn to a profile of Kyiv's “residential ring” and its changes in post-Soviet time (Kravets and Sovsun, 2012; Skubytska, 2012; Tyshchenko, 2012b). I write “suburbia” in quotations because not all of the places that we will discuss here are actually beyond Kyiv's municipal limits. A great many of Kyiv's bedroom zones (spalni raiony) are well within the city.

We can think of Kyiv as essentially two residential zones: (1) a central core in which the majority of dwellings are older apartment structures such as those from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but within which many new tall, modern residential structures are being built; and (2) an expansive outer zone of newer apartment buildings, most generally taller than the older ones in the core, that is the ring of “bedroom suburbs” around the city. Another fair generalization is to say that much of the development of the outer zone began after World War II as a response to the housing shortages that were caused by wartime damage in the city and postwar rural-tourban migration. Construction was stepped up in the 1970s and 1980s in connection with the Soviet government's efforts to ease the housing crisis that was exacerbated with extra-rapid population growth and industrialization, and to improve the quality of urban housing. The majority of these buildings are in planned mikroraion developments that characterize Soviet city planning. These neighborhood units were all pretty much the same, not just across Kyiv but also within Soviet urban space more generally, as were the individual apartment structures and the individual apartments.

The most fundamental change in the housing landscape is the shift from state ownership of most housing to the private sector, and the concomitant emergence of a society that is increasingly one of home and apartment owners as opposed to tenants.