Discursive Practices of Citizens as a Communicative Mechanism for Forming The Image of a Comfortable City (Practical Research Experience)

Citizens are an active subject of the urban environment development, they formulate and express their request for the comfort of the city through discourses. In this regard, an urgent problem is to determine the criteria for the comfort of the urban environment and the attitude of citizens to the city through the analysis of their discursive practices. For this purpose, a study was conducted, the object of which was the residents of the city of Tomsk. A total of 22 semi-formal interviews were held, during which citizens freely expressed their attitude to the city as a whole, focused on their values in the context of the urban environment, pointed out the shortcomings of the urban space, and described in detail their understanding of the comfort of the urban environment. The method of analysis was discourse analysis of interview texts. The main conclusions of the study are the following. Firstly, the informants understand a comfortable city as a place where citizens have everything that is important to them and, at the same time, do not interfere with other people's lives. Secondly, the assessments of Tomsk are diverse and contradictory; they include retrospective and territorial-state aspects, are divided into negative, combined and positive. When giving assessments, the informants are guided primarily by personal values and meanings. In this regard, for a better understanding of comfort, it is necessary to analyze the criteria for evaluating the urban environment. Thirdly, the categories of comfort of the city have been divided into two groups - related to vital (environment, power, security, demography, infrastructure, leisure categories) and existential (citizens' activity, citizens'moral qualities, emotional, socio-humanistic, personal, self-realization opportunity categories) needs of citizens. They are equal in number; thus, it can be inferred that at the moment the satisfaction of citizens' vital needs in the urban environment becomes a matter of course and takes a back seat, while existential needs become the most relevant. It is existential needs that citizens pay more attention to when forming a request for the quality of the urban space. However, when planning the development of the urban environment, city managers focus on vital categories, which is confirmed by official ratings of the quality of cities - there are practically no existential categories in them. Thus, the study confirms the fact that the understanding of the comfort by government representatives and by citizens is different. Therefore, it is obvious that there is a need to form a common semantic field of interaction, a dialogue between government structures and citizens to coordinate ideas and form common goals for the development of the city.

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