A Situational Approach to Strategic Management and Monitoring of Regional and Urban Development

Abstract

Through a situational approach to strategic management of regional and urban development it is possible to identify the interaction between the managerial process and mechanism; bring together the spatial and activity-related concepts of territorial development; and explain the phenomenon in question from both general and specific perspectives. Territorial development is becoming the principal object of strategic management of a region or city, its key tool being the utilization of its own good practices. The main objective of territorial development is increasing the capacity for constructive interaction between all its “actors and factors”. In this situation, the monitoring territorial development is seen as an integral part of management. It ensures the inventory, observation, and comparison of various trends determining the situation, as well as the results of actions aimed at its targeted alteration. Monitoring helps not only to promptly identify threats, but also to detect the opportunities for developing the situation in the desired directions within the “natural” trends of its dynamics. The situational approach to the monitoring of regional and urban development presented in the article was implemented in the development of the Strategy for the Socioeconomic Development of the City of Moscow until 2015 (as commissioned by the Department of Economic Policy and Development of the Government of Moscow) by an international team headed by the experts of the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration and the Higher School of Economics.