…AND THE RICH WOULD ENVY THE POOR. HOW A DEPRESSED RURAL AREA OVERCAME POVERTY (ALTAI MANAGEMENT PRACTICE)

Abstract

It is widely believed that the current century is going to be the one of cities. Life will concentrate around major agglomerations, and traveling around the world will be nothing more than a inter-megapolis transfer... Meanwhile, in Russia the percentage of the rural population, spread almost around the whole territory of the largest country, is rather high. Every third inhabitant in the Urals is a deep-rooted provincial. Pro-vin-cial. Can you feel - images of hopelessness, impassability and money lack start floating in your head? These stilted negative cliches deprive remote territories of a chance to overcome captive stereotypes, deprive of hope. And hope - symbolic capital - is sometimes of greater value than real money. What should local authorities do? Some stake on megapolis proximity, thinking about transport system and everyday manpower “export”; others conceive the metropolitan sheen in their own backyard, developing creative spaces, moulding fashion for naturality; and some have given up - if not Ekaterinburg, Moscow will help, when it gets even worse. Of all the“survival strategies”, the most important is experience - bad, good - different. And since, as is known, there are no prophets in our Fatherland, to gain management experience we are heading for a deeply provincial and once depressed area in the Altai Territory. More precisely - to the Blagoveshchenskyi territory. The place is "what you need”: 275 km west of Barnaul. Not a single city - only industrial townships. Risk farming zone. Sharply continental climate. The average temperature in January -18.2 ° C; July + 19.8 ° C. Clay, gravel and sand are the only natural resources. Andrey Gints, 62, has been the head of the local administration since 2008. A local: a native-born to the territorial center, which is Blagoveshchenka industrial township. So, the Altai experience of territorial management - to the Urals inhabitans.