Municipal strategic planning in Russia in 2010–2014

Abstract

The five-year stage of municipal strategizing in Russia from 2010 to 2014 is reviewed by the author’s method of formalized description of the content of municipal strategies, which makes it possible to identify the general direction of a strategy and describe specific semantic units. Forty strategic planning documents of Russian cities with populations of over 100000 people have been investigated. A significant diversity of forms and approaches to planning is revealed. Comparison with strategies of earlier stages has shown a tendency toward strengthening qualities recognized as good strategy attributes by the consensus of the expert community, i.e., the ambitiousness and number of strategies with high attention to implementation issues have significantly increased. Wording of urban strategy objectives are analyzed, which are very similar in nature and are most often associated with economic development or improvement in quality of life. An attempt to compare strategies by quantitative target values has failed because of differences in the sets of indicators and deadlines. It has been possible to identify and compare the values of only one indicator (investments in fixed assets from all sources of financing), which is very varied.