ISSN-L: 0798-1015 • eISSN: 2739-0071 (En línea) - Revista Espacios – Vol. 42, Nº 20, Año 2021
DEREVIANCHENKO I.I. & RUDI A.S. «Social professional portrait of the middle class: regional aspect (Case
Study: the City of Omsk-Russia)»
danger for lagging cities is the migration of representatives of the middle class - carriers of creative capital. The
problem of dying cities is considered by Florida in his recent monograph, which analyzes the competition
between urban centers (Florida, R, 2017) and provides confirmation that cities with a higher population density
are more effective for establishing a creative environment.
The creative city promotes the integration of culture into other spheres of public life, primarily into the economy,
which corresponds to the logic of the historical transition of cities from an industrial economy to a knowledge
economy. Well-measured features of a creative urban space are the number, diversity and accessibility of
educational institutions, science, culture, creative platforms, as well as the effectiveness of political mechanisms
to promote creative business. The theoretical model of a creative city is closely related to the development of
civil society; an important difference of a creative city is that the initiation of development projects is carried out
not by the authorities, but by the urban population, characterized by cultural diversity, openness to acceptance
of something else, and tolerance. The city authorities are expected to support civil initiatives for the development
of urban space, as well as attract the business investments required for this support. In such a situation, the basic
interest of social development is to increase the comfort of life for people in a creative city to retain human
capital through the creation of creative clusters, research centers, vocational training centers, and the
development of programs for financial, legal and tax support. It is the middle class that is able to realize the
potential of the creative city (Florida, R, 2002; Florida, R, 2005; Landry, Ch., 2006).
The connection between the middle class and the creative urban environment is clearly visible in Russia. One of
the characteristic features of the Russian middle class is heterogeneity, which is especially noticeable in
settlements of different sizes. The middle class in Russia is mainly concentrated in rapidly growing regional
centers with a population of more than a million people (Yekaterinburg, Kazan, Krasnodar, Novosibirsk). In cities
with a population of less than 500 thousand, the share of the middle class is significantly lower. Ufa, Perm, Omsk,
Chelyabinsk and Volgograd occupy an intermediate position between large cities of the post-industrial type and
smaller settlements, in which industrial production continues to dominate and many stratification features
formed during the Soviet period remain.
Cities that are lagging behind in the development of the knowledge economy are losing their population,
especially of a young age, mainly with a higher education. The main reason for the significant loss of middle class
youth is active migration processes, which are associated with the peculiarities of the conditions for self-
realization in the region. Young people of the middle class often do not see their future in a city that lacks legal,
administrative and infrastructural conditions for realizing their potential.
In Russia, in 2019, experts from the Calvert 22-Foundation and the PwC-group of consulting companies published
the results of a study of twenty Russian cities for the severity of about two hundred indicators of creative and
innovative development (PWC Russia, 2019). The indicators belonged to five basic blocks: the city itself, its
inhabitants, business, government, brands, i.e. everything that clearly enough describes the state of urban
infrastructure, human capital, business environment, urban policy, city image. The ten cities that realize the
creative potential to the greatest extent were compiled in descending order as follows: Moscow, St. Petersburg,
Kazan, Yekaterinburg, Vladivostok, Novosibirsk, Tyumen, Krasnodar, Kaliningrad, Veliky Novgorod. Omsk is the
ninth most populous Russian city, one of the fifteen million-plus cities in Russia, and has closed the twenty
creative cities. However, according to Rosstat, in the first four months of 2021, the population of the Omsk region
decreased by 3,902 people, as a result, the Omsk region is in first place in terms of migration loss among 85
regions of Russia (FSSS/Omsk, 2021).
The complexity and ambiguity of regional development in Russian conditions poses a number of tasks for
researchers, one of the most important of which is to identify the main characteristics of the middle class of a
typical Russian large city, since the sustainable socio-economic development of the region largely depends on a