ГОРОЖАНИН И ПАРК: ПОВСЕДНЕВНЫЕ ПРАКТИКИ ВЗАИМОДЕЙСТВИЯ С ПРИРОДОЙ НА ПРИМЕРЕ СОВЕТСКОГО ЧЕЛЯБИНСКА

Abstract

The article considers the formation of urbanized practices in green spaces using the example of soviet Chelyabinsk. In the 1930s–1960s, Chelyabinsk was a fast-growing industrial city, where a large relict pine forest was preserved. For soviet managers and new city dwellers, the forest became a “testing ground” for mastering new practices of interaction with nature in conditions of accelerated urbanization. Especially when in the 1930s a part of the forest was repurposed into the Park of Culture and Recreation. Based on archived and journalistic materials, it is shown that the semantic and functional distinction between the park and the forest led to the formation of two types of practices of interaction between city residents and nature. Contrasting the park with the forest, party leaders insisted on the development of infrastructure for the “cultural”, “organized” recreation of new Soviet citizens, while the forest became a space for interaction with the natural world unregulated by the authorities. During the 1960s the forests public image transformed, from a wild suburban forest to a fragment of pristine nature, miraculously surviving in an industrial city, with the Park of Culture and Recreation forming the “grand entrance”. It is concluded that urban practices of interaction with nature developed in two ways. The first is the “acculturation” of the forest area through political actions to establish an ideologically approved recreation for new citizens. The second way was constituted by the formation of citizens’ ecological consciousness in the context of a greenery deficit in the industrial areas of the city.