Between Adaptation and Alienation: Socio-Infrastructural Dynamics in Two Small Latvian Monotowns

Vangaži and Seda are two Latvian ‘small monotowns’: ‘settlements of urban significance’ built in Soviet times around factories and extraction sites, whose economy declined after the collapse of the USSR, slowly turning them into residential satellites of larger urban centres. This study, based on interviews with local residents and with the support of statistical data and on-site observation, investigates the dynamics of infrastructural maintenance, industrial change, and community culture and life in these settlements, to underline the mutual interdependency of material changes and societal attitudes and perceptions, and the dynamic nature of the latter, also exploring variation along socio-demographic lines.