Balancing unification and diversity in urban spatial development: adapting predictive social design technology for master planning
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: The article focuses on the development of an adapted technology of predictive social design (PSD) as applied to the tasks of strategic master planning for urban agglomerations. The relevance of the study stems from the persistent contradiction between the technocratic approach to urban planning, which suffers from "social addresslessness" and the actual needs of local communities. The theoretical and methodological foundation of the research is the eco-anthropocentric paradigm of T.M. Dridze, supplemented by the dichotomy of unification and diversity as an operational principle for constructing the research toolkit. The paper demonstrates that directly transferring the classical PSD technology, which is originally developed for local urban conflicts, to the level of strategic city-wide planning encounters a number of unresolved methodological problems: resource deficit, the risk of expert dilettantism, the functional distance of the sociologist, and the need to create a "self-playing final product. The adapted technology is presented that comprises three interrelated components: a three-phase research algorithm ("funnel" – desk, field, and post-field stages), a three-circuit model of subjective diversity (functional, existential, and projective-constructive circuits), and a system of analytical protocols (hierarchical synthesis, triangulation, and spatial localization of data). The end product of the technology is a master plan in the format of a "social contract" – a document that transforms the diversity of city dwellers’ lifeworlds into a unified strategic document and possesses its own predictive power. The developed technology extends the scope of applicability of the eco-anthropocentric paradigm and fills a methodological gap in the sociological support of strategic master planning.
Institution: Institute of Sociology
Language: English
Subfield: Urban Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7222399897