Humanities & Social Sciences, Vol 11, No 9 (2018)

Russian Urban Environment Research Review

Ksenia Reznikova

Abstract


Culturological and sociological research of Russian urban environment is a relatively young trend in the Russian humanities; before 1991, the urban environment research was only carried out within the framework of city planning surveys. In the 1990-s, sociological and culturological studies of urban environment began; in the 21st century, the number of such researches began to grow, with the greatest interest towards the actual environment conditions; only few researchers focus on the Soviet or pre-Revolutionary past. The main methods of Russian urban environment research are: overt observation, mapping (using GIS), interview and questionnaire survey. The researches focus not only and not rather on capital cities, but also on regional centres and small provincial towns. The important problemsarethelocal, “non-façade” issues of themodernurban environment; those are not only the material components of the urban environment that are of the researchers’ interest, but the intangible ones, such as emotions, perception by the residents, audial component of the city etc. In the contemporary researches of Russian urban environment, description and analysis of particular cases prevail over the theoretical generalizations, which proves the vibrant development of this field of study.