Founded by Peter the Great a mere sixty years before Catherine II ascended Russia’s throne, St. Petersburg became one of the leading economic and political centers of Europe during her reign. Catherine lavished planning on St. Petersburg, but her reign has been largely overlooked in academic literature, despite the fact that much of the city’s image in Russian culture was established in that epoch. The city’s detractors over the centuries have enumerated many reasons why the city never should have been established and why it should not have grown. Yet grow it did. No other city in the world situated so far north (almost on the sixtieth parallel) is more than a fifth its size. The Most Intentional City reveals just how St. Petersburg assumed its vitality, its social and economic strength, and its identity in myth and legend.