№4 (23) December 2006

The article published in the previous issue was devoted to the steady city development. Here we shall continue the discussion of problems concerning the social stability of a city, basing on one of the fundamental, strategic categories of a place, - its history[1]. The interest of society to its history is approved by appearing of such modern forms as credit or grant histories, interest to the memoirs and the biographic literature, incredible significance of Curriculum Vitae in a labour market. There is an impression that the scale of history is changing, - global or national chronicles concede to local and personal ones.

Nowadays the attention of scientists, experts, specialists of local lore and artists is drawn to the theme of local history. In Norilsk the conference will be hold on this theme[2] for the third time already. Saratov is searching its identity and cultural symbolical resources of development[3]. The topicality of this direction is caused by the complexity of change of identity from totalitarian (i.e. essentially mono-subject: the unique community - Soviet people) to the democratic (i.e. essentially poly-subject). Changing of identity cannot occur without fundamental changes in community culture.

Let us compare dominating properties of cultures between which our society is:

By means of the cultural norms distinguished in the left column, the totalitarian modes are striving for achieving an internal and external (international) recognition, thus, as a rule, ignoring the real changes in life of a country or a city, some separate social group, in consequence, the crisis is driven inside of a system and continues to develop in a hidden manner. In a situation of constantly increasing complexity of a life, the usage of only one model of development turns to be inadmissible risk.

During the transition period there occurs the reference to history everywhere and opens an opportunity of its revision. The history of a city can be represented in a new way, in the form of bringing together the histories of various city groups, (the organizations, the human races, the neighbourhoods) which should lead, in the result, to absolutely new integration of a society (to reform it). As consistent work with the city and social past we shall set as an example the capital of Catalonia - Barcelona.

Experience of Barcelona: history as a strategy

In the lecture of American urbanist B.Ruble[4], reported within the project «the Cultural Capital» of the Privolzhsky Federal Okrug on September 22, 2003 there was a remarkable example of Barcelona management modernization after leaving the dictator Franco.

At this stage the intellectuals – the writers were involved into management of the city . In particular, the headquarters of changes at the City Administration was leaded by well-known Spanish writer Josep Subiros. Such practice differs essentially from our rate on strong business executive managers who are overwhelmed with concerns of material property (pipes, roads, black oil, money for building materials, etc.).

According to the conception of Subiros - the reformer of a city life - it was necessary, first of all, to change the culture of community itself for realization of real changes instead of their imitation.

For this purpose it is necessary to modernize the people’s attitude to the systematic categories of a place, which characterize the city in people’s consciousness and also to generate its new image. Such categories of a place forming consciousness of the citizens include: feeling of space-time, the order and hierarchy, sequence and accumulation, connectivity and memory[5].

Moving in this direction, local authorities of Barcelona helped the inhabitants to become the owners of the city. Bringing up the economic attitude to the city became the purpose of programs on preservation of historical and cultural values, on construction of new monuments, on establishment of the new non-governmental organizations, on arrangement of public spaces for mass holidays and shows.

A new mass city art, in conditions of globalization, should become tolerant concerning ethnic, religious and political peculiarities not only of local community, otherwise there can be crisis phenomena like reaction of the Muslim world to the Danish caricatures. With the help of culture’s forms (performances, festivals, exhibitions) - the new democratic thinking is formed. Cultural intervention provokes changes in economy where a deficiency of people thinking independently and taking their bearings in a complicated situation with people increases.

Economic changes in Barcelona were based on sequence of the following events:

· well-to-do citizens began to invest their money in new post-industrial sectors of economy (economy of impressions);

· local authorities increased financing in the sphere of education for the citizens to get the necessary skills in new economy;

· the authorities began to encourage the growth of citizens’ mobility (all of them were offered to look for a job in new sectors of economy, in new areas of the city and in the neighbouring regions);

· the authority has realized at last the absence of dependence between well-being of the city (region) and richness of natural resources. In fact many of the successful countries, for instance, Japan, the Netherlands, have not got such resources. The basic contribution to national wealth occurs due to the human capital. According to Herman Daly «the new economy of steady development shows demand not so much for natural resources as for ethical resources of mankind» (italcized by me, N.Pr.). This way requires the development of absolutely different skills and abilities, - the moral training, the development of creativity and imagination, the ability to find solution in a complicated hopeless situation.

· the authorities made a conclusion, that a complex of problems in any city or region resulted from great variety of human relationships. Thus it means that the management is a complicated dynamic process of a constant establishment of relationships within time and space with plenty of subjects of city life. Certainly it is much easier to follow a formal set of norms and rules, however, to operate in such a way in a complicated and unpredictable world turns out to be not so effective.

So, I approve that one of the most important technologies in modern time becomes the organization of the social communication. First of all, it is a question, of technology of various partnerships’ creation (strategic ones - for development of strategies, social ones- for solution of concrete social problems, creative ones - for creation of innovations).

During the creation of partnership the following is required: an openness and skill to find a compromise in difficult situations. Such ability is very rare to meet nowadays. We are not able to respect the opposite points of view striving for their suppression. It is the consequence of culture’s militarization we live in. Too many influential groups in our country are interested in escalation of war (financiers, military-industrial lobby, and policy of force). The only one product, which we produce good enough and which is on sale in the world markets, is Kalashnikov's submachine-gun.

One-sidedness and jaundice can be overcome with aspiration to objectivity and to the constant analysis of a changing situation. It is so frequently we have not got enough time and means for analysing the situation or for inviting a competent specialist, an expert. During the process of intensification of a city life it is necessary to work out methods of the express-diagnostics of socio-cultural tendencies in the city. It is very important for the community to single out constantly two plans, - operative, making the agenda and aimed for action, and historical, i.e. where the analysis of the past and appropriate conclusions are drawn.

Among our weak points there is good analytics that distinguishes the ability and the skill to make out the variety of social life. The new economy and new forms of social life need a new culture. Thus, changing the culture of community becomes the primary goal of the branch dealing with culture. This problem can be understood, estimated and thus, supported by business. It is business that comes across with social and cultural "waste", not having an opportunity to get the qualified staff for their job.

Thus, the switch from totalitarianism to democracy requires restoration of the rights of personality and separate social groups for history, for development, for inclusion into active public life of a city that is sometimes compared with specifically cultural model - a society of performance.

So in London a theatre of “homeless” or the so-called –“theatre of cardboard boxes” appeared. The homeless citizens who have to build their shelters from cardboard boxes every day, use them when constructing the scenery for playing their life scenes and showing to the society. As a result of this, the life of homeless people becomes better (due to the donations, the sold tickets, programs and magazines). Besides, this performance stimulates well-to-do citizens to invest their money in a new post-industrial sector of economy.

Virtualization of real space

We live at such period of time when interaction with other worlds has become easier, it becomes a part of our daily routine, a property of increasing number of subjects, - countries, cities, firms, public organizations and separate persons are engaged with this point. The most important is that our children easily find their bearings in a virtual reality, in its turn they make a significant part of a museum audience and young community of citizens of the future.

Besides the opportunity of real game with the city environment, the virtual city functions as the ordinary guidebook. Here it is possible to find out real schedules of buses, the menu of local cafes, the telephone directory. Besides, the virtual city works with «collective unconsciousness», allowing adding idols of a mass culture to the alleys of heroes, to support them by renewing the wall of messages, congratulations and other things. The virtual double of a city becomes a forum of the intercity communication.

Director of the Gdovsky museum has worked out the project mobilizing electronic community of «virtual citizens», those who lived in a city or worked, who are seriously (i.e. actively) concerned with the future of a city, who are ready to make donations of money, to participate in projects. The Russian Museum and the Tretyakov Gallery build their own «electronic representation platforms», in Karelia the project KOMART is created, allowing to carry out the communications, concerning the cultural situation in republic, and to affect its cultural policy as well. Among the applications submitted for a competition - «The Changing Museum in the Changing World» based on Potanin Foundation, a number of project ideas in a virtual sphere grows:

The project «Park for one day» presupposes the creation of an electronic course of history of landscape art (Voskresensk, Moscow region);

«A virtual museum of a family album’s photos» in the National museum of the Udmurt Republic by Kuzebay Gerd is aimed for research of local family histories.

«A. P. Chekhov's virtual museum» of A.P. Chekhov State Literary-Memorial Museum-Reserve, in the Moscow region (Chekhov region, Melikhovo), will allow the admirers of the writer to cooperate with funds of a museum in a distance.

The new direction of activity with the use of information technologies forms a new direction, - virtual history of various subjects of activity.

Resources and investments into development

Development - is rather resourceful process requiring constant attraction of reserves and regular revision of resource sources. If at the beginning the material resources are not as important as the realization (image) of the goal it is necessary to move to then at the end of some certain stage it becomes important to analyze the already done and to supply with guarantees during the process of realization.

Conducting the regional seminars on the local development, participating in development of strategies, we often come across with a situation of poverty and catastrophic lack of resources. In this case, the representatives of administrations and the leaders of local communities, as a rule[6], overestimate the value of money, they become bogged down on the problem of absence of financing. At the same time they underestimate humanitarian (creative and project) and technical (innovative and technological) components and it deprives of an opportunity to make changes for the best.

The poor consciousness deprived of project imagination and images of the future, experiences difficulties to state the purposes and to restrict the area of its own activity voluntary.

Beginning the process of development, it is required, first of all, to find right direction, to collect the managing volition which includes the consent of all community to concentrate the capital (not only financial, but also social and cultural) and to start investing new, strategic directions, while ceasing investment in outdated and unprofitable kinds of activity for a city.

Working with the city, as a rule, we come across with viscous problematic jumble where it is possible to single out:

· The control system which is stuck in routine, daily affairs with irrational forms of the reporting;

· Rather conservative system of housing and communal services engaged in patching the holes and requiring scale modernization;

· The apathetic and passive community which does not trust the authority and possesses narrow point of view concerning their own future;

· The authority ignoring creative potential of people and treating them like applicants and an importunate handicap in their activity.

· The big business, which doesn’t take into consideration the local situation and doesn’t want "to share" with local community as well.

· The small business balancing on the verge of a survival and using mainly fine trade and «short money», and focused on construction of "relationships" instead of a game by rules.

As a result of the begun activity on the strategy development the analysis revealing contrast features of the settlement comes. One of these features should be strengthened - i.e. to be developed, while others (negative ones) should be corrected or blocked or somehow neutralized.

At the first stage of strategic planning the following actions should be made:

• Distinguishing the key figures of the local community capable to occupy a civic position;

· Gradually (through training, doing the tasks of tutors), during the discussions and working communications the initial uncertainty of a problem starts to decrease and the involvement of participants into processes of strategy’s development starts to increase.

For many participants the incentive for including their own gained through suffering project into Strategy which remains unclaimed in a routine control system can become a real motive. But not each project works for the strategy. It often happens that the participants do not have the projects themselves but the so-called preparations to the projects where in the most general features the local initiatives are described, as a matter of fact, - wishes which are impossible to estimate and to make an examination as the strategy of development is not formulated yet and there is no general vision of the future city. But even when such strategy is developed and fixed, there comes a temptation to accept investments, to get "easy" money from somebody without considering the strategy.

It is clear that not only technical devices should have system of protection against "vandalism", but also such complex socially-spatial systems as city. When the city community does not participate in decision-making processes, the danger of inadequate and sometimes criminal decisions in this sphere increases.

It is certainly some kind of “extreme” case, but in our life we often come across with such unpredictable situations, and the most important tool for their solution is the transparency of decisions. Certainly, the strategy can be corrected by trial and error method, however, in case of risks’ increase it is necessary to be able to model consequences (technical, social, competitive) taking as a starting point the change of development’s priorities.

The strategic project results not only from the strategic plan, it is also coordinated with vision and the purposes of the organization that will strive for its execution. If for the commercial organizations it is easier to construct the scale of priority using only one parameter, - profitability, so for the city projects it is important the size of the increment in the complex of various capitals is important: symbolical, social, cultural and investment ones.

The city should have an abundant stock of ideas and projects, i.e. more than it can realize in reality. If there are no ideas in the city, no innovations, and new points of growth do not open, such city is likely to have an outflow of the active population for which the horizon of opportunities while choosing the place of living is an important factor. Thus, the formulation of the scale purposes and the development of key interesting projects are the most important things that allow surviving in a situation of increasing competition.

Social stability

The Forum of Cities of the 60^th Parallel that took place in Surgut was connected with searches of social stability. It is not by chance that the participants discussed the experience of success and problems in development.

The transition period is always socially unstable situation without politicians and institutes engaged in security of integration of various social groups. Moreover it is not so much necessary to integrate a reliable and loyal part of community which is always at authority’s hand (we have “pocket” specialists of local lore, obedient societies of veterans of war and youth), as the groups which keep far away from authority, which have divided from normal life of the communities.

They are the inhabitants of barns, barracks, and areas with lots of addicts, alcoholics, prostitution, and the places of the latent settling of “Gastarbeiter”. It is necessary to refer the nationalists and the migrants, not adapted for a local culture, to the problematic social groups. They should be integrated into local community as they still do not consider our cities as theirs. The programs of optimization of migration process which is carried out naturally and in disorganized way become topical. The program can include the search of the certain immigrants with business-like abilities and money resources who will be able to become agents of development. If we do not have our own agents of development - they have to be imagined and found[7].

The organization of interaction between rich and poor members of community is very essential. The attitude to the wealth is not arranged in our culture and religion. On the one hand our society has the indifferent attitude to poverty. In its turn, the poor men consider that to rob a rich man or to cheat him out of money - is valour and the rich consider the poor to be lazybones and hampered. There are practically no duplicated models of good output from difficult life situations. The human right for weakness or mistake is not admitted, and it impossible to master new spheres without it where the probability of a mistake swiftly increases.

Questions of providing with succession (in family, in firm, in management of city) in our society are extremely complicated. There are also certain barriers between men and women. Here we should also regulate the interaction. In Russia the specific social phenomenon is fixed - unwillingness of the majority of women to get married. To live alone and to make a career is much easier. Such woman considers the husband as a burden. Such tendency shows the general intensification of life which destroys not only gender but also family, friendly and neighbour's relationships. There is a social instability, and as the result of this there is a need for special social work.

Racial, ethnic, religious conflicts and struggle of citizens of various levels of well-being are strengthened. People often treat an enterprising person who brings the contribution to development of a city or a region as the enemy as he lives better then they do. People do not understand that he deducts his income, i.e. that money with the help of which people exist, but mass media and culture do not explain it to them. Thus, it is possible to approve that steadily organized social environment is not a luxury nowadays, it is a vital necessity.

The fundamental research of two outstanding Canadian urbanists - Mario Polese (Quebec University, Montreal) and Richard Stren (Toronto University) was entitled “Social Sustainability of Cities” and published in 2000. There is one of the key theses in this work which is important for us, it approves that the basic stimulus of cities’ development is not the economy and building-up the industry as many believe, but the social stability, i.e. «a policy and the institutes carrying out the integration of various groups and cultures according to the principles of reason and justice». When there is no rational-ethical beginning in the whole world, then the racial, ethnic, religious conflicts and the struggle of citizens of various living standards increase.

The effectiveness of municipal government to a great extent is connected with feasible distribution of the responsibility, decentralization of management and involvement of local community in decision-making processes concerning city life and ways of its development. These directions should be not only acclaimed, declared, but also transformed into special administrative technologies and sources of studying. But it is a point of discussion for the next article. Let us summarize.

So, we live in epoch when there is not only disintegration of definite political, economical, social communications, but also when there are absolutely new groupings and associations, new integration. We lack effectively operating, well organized partnerships. Various subjects are involved in processes of interaction and communication, and more often they are new, they do not have previous experience of interaction. It is replaced with vision - identification, i.e. how a person treats his today's position and what previous events he connects it with. In the universal distribution of strategy’s working-outs (not only in business but also in the sphere of local government and career growth) the horizons of vision become very important, not only the future but also the past which becomes the fundamental for building-up the future. In this respect, unlike the Soviet period, the person drops out of the net of relationships without the built-up past, he cannot define his strategy of development. The majority of problems we come across with are caused not only by narrowness of vision of the municipal and All-Russian perspective but also by friability of the historical foundation.

[1] Our state took away, takes away and, it seems, is going to take away from people the right for their own history. In imperial Russia this right was usurped by the Romanovs’ House and privileged nobility. The merchants began to win this right gradually only in the end of XIX – in the beginning of XX centuries when the merchant genealogies and history of the enterprises began to be published. Later on in the Soviet history, studying the history of the enterprises continued (in a series by M. Gorky), the only one subject of history was declared the working class and only two significant events were admitted: October Revolution and the Great Patriotic War. The interest to genealogy, personal and daily history was awoken up again in the period of Perestroika. Many cities at that period made the revision concerning the time of their foundation, and moreover the increase of the remoteness’ point was considered to be the essential competitive advantage.

[2] History of a place: the textbook or the novel? Anthology of materials of the first annual conference within the research project «Local histories: scientific, art and educational aspects» (Norilsk, 9-11th of December, 2004), M., the New Literary Review, 2005, - 320 p.

[3] Saratov: identity, resources, strategies: Materials of the All-Russian Scientific Conference/ Edited by Fokina - Saratov, Publishing house of the Saratov University, 2004, 2004 p.

[4] B. Ruble, the lecture: «Between decentralization and democratization: global value of development of municipal government», Cultural Capital, 22.09.2003, the address of the document in the Internet: www.culturecapital.ru/university-2003/city_culture/10>

[5] The same address.

[6] Bruner J., Psychology of knowledge. Outside the direct information, Progress, 1977, p. 413, p. 300.

[7] Such program is worked out by Nakhodka in Primorsk region within the development strategy.