Контактность и конфликтность города: геоинформационный мониторинг и управление этнокультурным разнообразием

Abstract

This article is aimed to outline the possible design of the GIS-monitoring for revealing the problems associated with the growth of ethnocultural diversity in mega-cities. Monitoring is considered to be one of the urban governance pillars and a methodological approach allowing administration to meet specific challenges in situations, where the object of governance — interethnic relationships — is uncertain, fragile and changeable. The authors assume that an urban environment is a highly contact environment — a self-organized social reality permeated by plethora of links and interactions which can be influenced by the direct and indirect administration. In this context cultural diversity management is seen as a combination of practices corresponding to grass-route processes with strategic logic of the politics of counteracting to ethnic discrimination, violence and conflicts. The importance of the interdisciplinary approach to the analysis of the causes and consequences of interethnic and wider intercultural tensions in the cities is underlined in the article. The key principles of the ethnocultural diversity monitoring which ensure its efficiency as an analytical tool of policy-making are formulated. The empirical abilities and limits of various theoretical concepts, methods, and data sources are shown. The role of GIS as a platform to integrate and synthesize heterogeneous information from many sources — from statistical indicators and survey results to BigData and twitter-messages, is emphasized. The authors believe that the proposed design of the GIS-monitoring should allow to overcome the problem of direct political subordination of the ethnocultural politics at the city level to that at the regional and federal levels, and to realize the synthesis of different approaches instead of replicating.