section_path: Politics and administration
section_name: Politics and administration
paragraph_text: Politics and administration
  
  The status of Tbilisi, as the nation's capital, is defined by Article 10 of the Constitution of Georgia (1995) and the Law on Georgia's Capital – Tbilisi (20 February 1998).
  
  Tbilisi is governed by the Tbilisi City Assembly (Sakrebulo) and the Tbilisi City Hall (Meria). The City Assembly and mayor are elected once every four years by direct elections. The Mayor of Tbilisi is Kakha Kaladze and the Chairman of the Tbilisi city Assembly is Giorgi Alibegashvili.
  
  Administratively, the city is divided into raions (districts), which have their own units of central and local government with jurisdiction over a limited scope of affairs. This subdivision was established under Soviet rule in the 1930s, following the general subdivision of the Soviet Union. After Georgia regained independence, the raion system was modified and reshuffled. According to the latest revision, Tbilisi raions include:
  
  Most of the raions are named after historic quarters of the city. The citizens of Tbilisi widely recognize an informal system of smaller historic neighborhoods. Such neighborhoods are several, however, constituting a kind of hierarchy, because most of them have lost their distinctive topographic limits. The natural first level of subdivision of the city is into the right and left banks of the Mtkvari river.
  
  The names of the oldest neighborhoods go back to the early Middle Ages and sometimes pose a great linguistic interest. The newest whole-built developments bear chiefly residential marketing names.
  
  In 19th-century Tbilisi, the Georgian quarter was confined to the southeastern part of the city; Baedeker describes the layout succinctly:
  
  In the north part of the town, on the left bank of the Kurá and to the south of the railway station, stretches the clean German Quarter, formerly occupied by German immigrants from Württemberg (1818). To the south is the Gruzinian or Georgian Quarter (Avlabár). On the right bank of the Kurá is the Russian Quarter, the seat of the officials and of the larger business firms. This is adjoined on the south by the Armenian and Persian Bazaars.