Город как культурный феномен в гуманитарном градоведении XIX – XX веков

Abstract

The article contains the author's view on the formation and development of the Russian humanitarian urban studies in the 19th and 20th centuries. The relevance of the research is determined by the presence in the humanities of discussions about the anthropological understanding of the city, as well as polemics in the socio-political space of the country about the usefulness of promoting foreign urbanology concepts. The novelty of the research lies in the reconstruction of the historical path followed by representatives of the Russian intellectual environment when studying the city as a special cultural phenomenon. Unlike foreign researchers, in whose works an economy-centric view of the city prevailed, domestic scientists built their urban research on the trend of cultural centrism. This reveals an organic continuation of the cultural and philosophical tradition of studying the multidimensional foundations of the life of Russian society, which originated in the 18th century. The aim of the study is to investigate the process of formation and evolution of the ideological and theoretical foundations in the domestic humanitarian urban studies, which significantly differed from the attitudes generally accepted in western "urbanology". This goal is achieved through the solution of the following research objectives: identifying stages in the development of humanitarian urban studies as a promising direction in the study of the city and urban communities; identifying and characterizing the features of the intellectual search for describing the "physiognomy" of the city, a characteristic of Russian scientists of the 19th century; investigating the substantive foundations in the works of historians of the 20th century, who studied the city as a "laboratory of culture"; outlining the features of the historical-phenomenal approach in the humanities of urban studies of the 20th century, in which the city was considered as a cultural phenomenon and the idea of the cultural centrality of urban communities was formulated. The methods traditionally employed in historical science such as historical-genetic, historical-comparative, historical-typological, historical-biographical, anthropological, etc. were used. The methodological basis provides for a geocultural approach to the city as a special center accumulating various useful forms of cultural activity of local communities, the derived super-cultural effect of which is the primary basis for scenarios for the development of local economies and political practices.