Changes in urban infrastructure under the influence of migration: challenges for cultural policy

Abstract

Research on the impact of migration on the urban cultural infrastructure plays an important role in the European social anthropology. The city cultural space appears as a kind of ‘multicultural machinery,’ whose operation is supported by multiple actors, from officials to ‘cultural brokers’. In the Russian scientific literature, there is a certain gap in the study of urban ‘multicultural machineries.’ Some studies of the migrants’ leisure practices and cultural consumption have been published, but the topic of public representation of cultural diversity associated with migration remains poorly researched. Meanwhile, the national policy, which is largely based on the Soviet cultural heritage in organizing intercultural interaction, faces new challenges associated with the generational change. Young people from Central Asia who come to Russia for study and work, do not consider Soviet cultural background as a self-evident point of reference anymore. In these conditions, a revision of the existing approaches to the integration of migrants into the cultural sphere of the host cities is required.

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