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

This trend is most noticeable in small towns, where employees of the city administration are often "known by sight" (sociologically speaking, the "power distance" is significantly lower[35]). As economic and social crises intensify, the power distance with respect to the municipal level of government will decrease much faster than with respect to the federal government. As a consequence, municipal authorities will have to respond more quickly to new requests from the citizens. This may become one of the defining processes in the formation of the city’s "agenda" for the years to come.

Municipal authorities will have to respond more quickly to new requests from the citizens. This may become one of the defining processes in the formation of the city’s "agenda" for the years to come.

Here is a statement by one of the small-town mayors (population under 50,000): "In the last month, people in the streets have been stopping me much more often and not even asking for help, but almost demanding to explain what is happening, and no one wants to hear that decisions are made in Moscow and that we are only the implementers." As mentioned above, it is impossible to assess how widespread the increase in "demand" from the population for direct communication and the formulation of new social guarantees is, based on just 10 interviews. However, as a research hypothesis, we can assume that such a process will begin not in megacities, where the citizen’s claims are already quite high, but in small towns — precisely because of the lower power distance.

It should be noted that all the federal center’s efforts in previous years were aimed at increasing the accountability of municipal administrations to the central authorities[36]. The events of 2022 could be an unexpected trigger to change the established trend. Simply put, employees of small and medium-sized city administrations will have to find a new balance between the growing "pressure" from two sides — both traditional on the federal and regional levels, and relatively new on the part of the urban population, which has anxieties about security and prospects for social stability.

As a research hypothesis, we can assume that "demand" from the population for direct communication with government representatives will begin not in megacities, but in small towns.

Interviews with heads of municipalities were conducted in the first half of October, that is, after the announcement of mobilization, but before the President of Russia issued a decree introducing special security regimes (medium level of response and high level of readiness) and formation of field staffs under the leadership of the heads of regions. It can be assumed that these administrative innovations will also affect the level of power distance. Of course, the mechanisms of implementation of the Presidential Decree and the reaction of the population may vary greatly depending on the geographical location (for example, the southern regions of the Central Federal District) or the socio-economic situation (the national republics). In any case, it is very likely that it will be representatives of the municipal level of government and, after some time, of the regional level of government who will be forced to respond en masse to the request to "rewrite the social contract."

While a year ago the "social contract" at the municipal level was based primarily on issues of improvement and infrastructure development (including, but not limited to, the construction and repair of social facilities), now its content may change. Based on the interviews conducted, we can assume that the main content will be to ensure social stability, at least to the extent that this is possible given the limited resources at the level of municipalities. Let us allow ourselves an even bolder generalization connecting, in a sense, the two hypotheses we have proposed. In 2021, as in the whole of the previous decade, the image of the future of Russian cities (the "development agenda" mentioned above) was determined almost exclusively by trends and innovations taking place in Moscow and other megacities (for example, the digitalization of the transport system or the formation of creative clusters). There is a fairly high probability that the image of the future of Russian cities after 2022 will largely depend on the "reassembly" of the social contract, the first signs of which we found in recent interviews.