The paper presents an experimental study showing the process of transformation of a phraseological expression into an urbanistic concept in historical dynamics. The experiment involved the native residents of Voronezh (n 68) aged 20-25, who presented a linguistic representation of the VORONEZH ZHLOB concept encoded in everyday consciousness, which allowed the researcher to identify the core and peripheral features of the concept, which in turn were a characteristic of the citizens’ personal qualities. The aim of the study is to develop and present a methodology for describing the transformation of a phraseological expression into a concept entrenched in the everyday consciousness of the native inhabitants of a city. The novelty of the study lies in describing the transformation of the characteristic word denoting the residents of Voronezh Oblast into a phraseological expression and, finally, the latter’s transformation into an urbanistic concept. As a result, it has been possible to identify the stages of substitution of some features by others at the semantic level, starting from the transformation of a characteristic word denoting the residents of a certain area into a phraseological expression and then into an urbanistic concept with a sociocultural basis. As a result, the transformation that took place led to the replacement of the meaning reflected in the urbanistic concept.