К методологии исследования восприятия городского пространства (случай Выборга)
Toward a Methodology for Researching the Perception of City Space (On the Case of Vyborg)

Summary/Abstract: The article provides an overview of research methods concerning the imaginary space of the city, which is connected to issues such as the mentality of urban inhabitants and the sites’s territorial and cultural identity. The interdisciplinary nature of such research is obvious, involving issues drawn from not only sociology and cultural anthropology, but also geography, urban anthropology, geohistory and other humanitarian fields. Each of these fields brings with it its own methods, making the research process more complex and creating a situation of methodological pluralism. Due to the diversity of research methods, first of all it proved important to determine the “dominant features” of the research object and then identify the usefulness of different research methods. In the case of the city of Vyborg, the most “dominant features” concerned its frontier location, its mixture of Swedish, Finnish and Russian histories, and its long isolation from important cultural and political systems due to the Russian-Finnish border. Border changes, made several times in the city’s history, precipitated major shifts in mentality and the formation of complex identities. This unusual dimension of the mentaity of Vyborg residents is described herein as an “identity dichotomy”.

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