The Interpretation of Public Participation in Urban Planning bу the Russian Professional Community

The mission of this work is to expand the Russian academic discourse on public participation in urban planning. The aim of the work is to interpret the public participation in urban planning in the Russian professional society. In this work, the professional community is understood as a set of urban planners and city managers. Public participation in urban planning is defined as the activity of professionals to include the urban population (non-professionals) in the decision-making process. The primary hypothesis was that we can distinguish two stable types of descriptions of public participation in Russian professional discourse: planning and managerial. An analytical framework for the interpretation of participation consists of an analysis of the definition, the rationale for the use of participation tools, and an assessment of the effectiveness. During the study, 24 interviews were conducted. The analysis was carried out in two stages: at the first stage, the entire variety of respondents' answers was investigated. During this study, it was possible to refute the basic hypothesis: city managers and city planners answers are similar. We made the following conclusions in the selected areas. The definition of participation, from the point of view of city managers and planners, is on the border between tokenism and participation on the ladder of citizen participation S. Arnstein. Rationales can be divided into instrumental, subjective and educational. The effectiveness of participation can be measured as the effectiveness of the process, the satisfaction of the population, the implementation of a quality project and the creation of a community. At the second stage of the analysis, we tried to build chains of relationships within the framework of one interview: definition –– method –– rationale –– evaluation of the result. We have identified three stable types of interpretation of participation: functional, research and value, which coexist in modern Russian professional discourse. The division of approaches is based on the position of residents in the process of project implementation.