Позитивные изменения. Города будущего. Тематический выпуск, 2022 / Positive changes. The cities of the future. Special issue, 2022

The city is a concept of modernity; it is created by a separate urban class of inhabitants. This urban class did not immediately discover itself and the place where it would gather. The coffee houses were the first public spaces where middle class could gather to communicate. This communication is believed to be the basis for the emergence of the civil society in Europe, an autonomous cultural sphere within which innovations take place (Pincus, 1995).

A special kind of infrastructure for creating points of social activity — so-called "social infrastructure" — is becoming a separate subject of research in geography and urban planning (Latham & Layton, 2019). The modern view of libraries, neighborhood centers, public spaces, laundromats, cafes, and sports recreation grounds is that they not only perform their specific functions and produce added value, but also have a "socialization" effect.

The approach of social infrastructure developed primarily with the consideration and participation of the local residents and urban communities, is that the social life unfolds for the most part in physical space, which can be studied and designed to match the development strategy of each community.

COMMUNITY TO CITY: PARTICIPATORY PRACTICES IN URBAN DESIGN

One of the new norms of urban development is the principle of community involvement in the development of the area, starting with "participatory design." Back in 2016, Project Group 8, together with Strelka KB, published a brochure[30] on public engagement practices in beautification projects. They mainly focus on the design of public spaces and interaction within the boundaries of the "business-authorities-society" triangle. The researchers distinguish a broad range of actors, each with their own interests and roles in the project: economic agents, political, experts, residents, users of the territory, citizens, the town-forming enterprise. Interestingly, public organizations and initiative groups have recently become key actors in participatory design. In particular, in 2022 the Russian Ministry of Construction published a methodological guidebook "Best Practices of Volunteer and Youth Associations in Territorial Development."

In the article "Participatory Design: Peculiarities of the Approach in Russia," experts Nadezhda Snegireva, Konstantin Kiyanenko, Yulia Bychkova, and Peter Ivanov note that existing practices of co-participation are limited in use, although they have a high potential in urban management, budgeting, and cultural systems. Because of this limited use, these practices ran into an obstacle — trying to integrate them into the vertical structures of state administration was ineffective. Another important issue is long-term co-participation: the participant must acquire subjectivity and responsibility that go beyond mere participation in the vote and extend to the future living scenarios of the local residents, so that the infrastructure developed continues to perform its social functions and "lives" beyond the construction period (Vereshchagina, 2021).

The general participatory development platform supports the main thesis: speaking of the city of the future, it is necessary to consider not just the design of beautification projects, but the broader context of community participation in all aspects of city governance. It is of a permanent nature, and also includes broader context of the items for which a collective decision is made. Participatory governance means that it is based on three key elements (Perezolova, 2018):

• civic participation;

• public discussions;

• empowerment of the public in governance.

Decision-making in this framework takes place after discussions with residents themselves, and with extensive accountability and feedback practices. Public participation in decision-making is presented as a pedagogical practice and serves to foster the values of self-governance, consociation, and responsibility for the common good.

Practices of public discussion of urban development projects are one of the key methods of engaging the public in governance, which can be accomplished, among other things, through participatory modeling to collectively address public problems. Modeling consists of the following stages: informing, public hearings, focus groups, opinion polls.

Interestingly, the wording "participatory modeling is a method of analyzing a problem by building a causal model with the involvement of stakeholders" clearly evokes associations with the theory of change, which similarly includes a causal model taking into account the interests of all parties involved and is used to implement socio-economic impact assessment on extended change projects (including cities of the future).