Interaction between the municipal authorities of St. Petersburg and local communities via Internet communications

Abstract

The level of civil activity and participation of local communities in solving local problems is an important pre-requisite for spatial development. The setting up of local communities, to a large extent, is the outcome of self-determination, the result of the actions of social actors, aimed at value-oriented and active involvement of citizens in local self-administration. Forming the local identity, ensuring the activation of the civil position, is one of the major objectives of municipal authorities. In St. Petersburg, where the local identity of the population is quite vague, and the municipal authorities, in fact, are dependent on the city's administration, which is preconditioned by the status of the city of the federal significance, the role the municipal authorities play in solving problems of the city's development must be reconsidered. At the height of the fourth industrial revolution, information technology is expanding the context and motivation for participating in the civil life, increasing unprecedentedly the level of public discourse and ensuring an interactive network environment for communications between the municipal authorities and local communities. In the research study, we evaluated the quality of communications between the municipal authorities of St. Petersburg and local communities through official websites and social media pages of intra-city municipalities of St. Petersburg. The research was conducted using the methods of content analysis, communicative-discourse and composite-graphical analysis, and the expert evaluation method. It was concluded that the existing resources are hardly suitable for solving the problems of intensifying civil participation of local communities and some guidelines were developed to detect the target audiences and expand the range of tools used for interactive communications.