Initiative Improvement in Saint-Petersburg: from Local Community Art towards Tactical Urbanism

Abstract

The article summarizes the preliminary results of the analysis of public initiatives in the field of landscaping in St. Petersburg. In order to systematize the variety of research approaches and assessments of interested persons authors used the methods of source analysis and generalization (grouping) of assessments and analogies in relation to the objects and phenomena under consideration.The practical part of the study consisted in the formation of an array of data and a bank of cases in the field of grassroots initiatives to improve the urban environment and the formation of public spaces. Based on the data obtained, there was created a map of the activity of urban communities, as well as a heat map, illustrating the foci of concentration of the social capital of the city. As the analytical tools authors used models of joint actions and cooperation, research methods of the theory of public goods and behavioral economics, as well as the method of geoinformation analysis.As a unifying term for the phenomena under consideration, the authors propose the term “initiative improving”, meaning a spontaneously emerging and developing form of civic activity at the place of residence using self-organization and self-financing tools. The range of revealed facts of initiative landscaping varies from negatively perceived ‘local community art’ (a form of naive and artisanal improvement of the space around a residential building) to initiatives of residents to restore and form public facilities approved by the majority (restoration of entrances of historical buildings, lost historical elements, green spaces). Intermediate forms in this regard are initiatives within the framework of territorial public self-government, festive events and temporary facilities. The concept that allows us to describe the most constructive format is M. Lydon's “tactical urbanism” — the theory of “small affairs” in the field of urban development.The novelty of the presented approach consists in the systematization of the facts of initiative improvement (including negative ones) and their integration into the general logic of modern urban development against the background of currently prevailing approaches based on the allocation of the decisive role of professionals and experts in this process.

Keywords

• civic activity
• urban environment
• public spaces
• civic initiatives
• initiative improvement
• tactical urbanism
• local community art