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DESIGNING CITY IDENTITIES: GOALS, MECHANISMS, ACTORS // ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2020. Issue 4 (26). P. 75-89

The article presents an interpretation of the study of city identities of the cities of Vladimir, Smolensk, and Yaroslavl in terms of describing the main goals, actors, and mechanisms for designing city identities. The problem of manageability of the development of local identities and the designing of local identities is one of the pressing issues of both the theory and practice of city community management. The author carried out a theoretical reflection on the concept of city local identity, understood as a psychosocial complex of a person that sets an emotionally important person’s self-relation to a group/community and determines the rules of people’s behavior in this group, the rules for admitting people to the group and expelling from it, the criteria for distinguishing “friends” and “foes" for the group. The results of the study made it possible to identify the main elements of city local identity: significant places (including the periphery and the symbolic center); ideas about local, medium- and large-scale geography; significant people of the city (“pantheon” of heroes—real and mythical); residents’ representations about their city; residents’ representations about about themselves; ideas about the structure of the community (core, borders, strata, segments); rituals of identity reproduction. The described elements of urban identities exist as a construct created by researchers rather than as a subject of city life. In order for a city identity to acquire subjectivity, special efforts are needed form the politically active part of the city residents. The article proposes an approximate model for designing the city identity: development of the city community; development of social “software” for interaction with each other; formation of an independent intellectual space with alternative competing “packages” of interests; public expression of interests on discussion platforms; creation of coalitions; competition; and promotion of one’s own agendas in the field of public policy. The study shows that a typical actor in the construction of city identity is the city government, which welcomes or rejects the attempts of the citizens and their associations to participate in the construction. The main mechanism for designing city identities is the activity in the symbolic sphere aimed at redefining and reinterpreting the past and present city community. Thus, the main factor in the construction of city identities is the resource of intellectual awareness and understanding of the characteristics of the city and city community; at the same time, the development of city identities, even when constructed by dominant groups, leads to the formation of the subjectivity of diverse groups and, consequently, to conflicts in the struggle for values. The conflicting nature of the development of collective identities raises a demand for an identity policy aimed not only at constructing a city identity, but also at revealing the possibilities of a positive interaction between different identities.

Keywords: city identity, city development, local communities, values, democratic intellectualism, actors, symbolic politics, political discourse