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

In the fall of 2021, we at the SKOLKOVO School of Management completed a training program for teams from the 100 largest cities in Russia. It was the largest training program in the country for municipal-level managers. Mayors presented their projects in the field of sustainable development, new industries, infrastructure and landscaping before governors and heads of federal agencies. These projects are a "replica" of the image of the future that we, together with the city teams, have been able to develop as a result of long and often tedious work.

Exactly one year has passed since then, and in this period the external context has changed more drastically than one could have ever imagined. Metaphorically speaking, our vision of the future has managed to turn obsolete several times. Therefore, in designing a new program for city teams, we decided to conduct an extra mini-study, in addition to the formal monitoring of the last year’s projects — a series of interviews with mayors and other participants of the last year’s program. The interview sampling included cities from the Central, Volga and Ural districts, regional centers, small and medium-sized towns. Of course, 10 heads of municipalities is not a representative sample by far, so within this text we will formulate several research hypotheses, which have yet to be tested as part of the continuation of our study, as well as directly in the dynamic public process. It seems important to record these hypotheses as a "fingerprint" of the new times, a reference point to which we can look back from the future to verify our predictions.

HYPOTHESIS 1: AT THE LEVEL OF THE MUNICIPAL BUREAUCRACY, THE DEVELOPMENT AGENDA IS REPLACED BY THE AGENDA OF MAINTAINING STABILITY

Today, it is obvious to everyone involved in urban, regional, and spatial development that there is a growing discrepancy between the "agenda of the future" and the "agenda of the present." This discrepancy existed before, and we at SKOLKOVO School of Management have regularly observed it, working with teams of regional and municipal administrations. We have seen that the concepts of "sustainable development," "technological change," and "energy transition" are much less integrated at the municipal level. In the course of the project work on the program, it became clear that it was not a matter of misunderstanding the terms — in fact, any civil servant knows the terms quite well. The point is the gap between the vocabulary used by the federal experts and the reality of regional and municipal management. Roughly speaking, an accident at the boiler plant limited the pace of energy transition, and the actions of the regulatory agencies contributed to the singularity, but not the way it was understood by the author of the term, Raymond Kurzweil.

Before 2022, this distance was functional: it played the role of a stimulus for development and was a useful tool for detecting problems. This is largely why educational programs exist — to "pull" managers out of the day-to-day bureaucratic grind and "update the firmware" of their managerial skills.

As of October 2022, the "development agenda" continues to exist by inertia partially at the level of federal government goal-setting, but the "agenda of maintaining stability" is becoming incomparably more relevant at the regional and municipal level. We can list the themes that were most frequently mentioned in the October 2022 interviews and compare them to the key themes of the final projects at the October 2021 program for city teams.

Of course, the comparison in the above table cannot be considered "scientifically valid": we are comparing a public presentation of urban development projects under the SKOLKOVO program "in front of the big bosses" vs a participation in interviews. Obviously, in the second situation, mayors as respondents are somewhat more forthright in listing the problems. At the same time, this factor should not be overestimated: the generalized readiness to express any opinion that differs from the official one has declined radically over the year, especially for state employees. Therefore, based on the comparison, we hypothesize the gradual replacement of the "development agenda" with the "agenda of stability."

HYPOTHESIS 2: MUNICIPAL LEVEL OF MANAGEMENT IS IN THE VANGUARD OF "REASSEMBLING THE SOCIAL CONTRACT"

One of the most interesting insights from the interview was the "demand for a new version of the social contract" mentioned by one of the administration heads (almost a verbatim quote). The respondent’s reasoning was as follows. Increasing the state’s demands to the population[34] imposes additional obligations on the municipalities as the level of government, as being "the closest to the people."