‘The Level of Fears Is off the Scale!’: Triggers of Urban Conflicts in the Context of Municipal Management (Novosibirsk Case Study)

This article represents a comprehensive study of transition peculiarities from a latent stage to the open demonstration of conflict, drawing on the concepts of base trigger, trigger situation, and crucial episode (L. Boltanski, L. Thévenot). The trigger situations of urban conflicts were studied on the broad empirical material of the Novosibirsk urban agglomeration over the last decade. The research authors created a geoinformation database containing a structured description of more than two hundred cases of urban conflict. The trigger is presented as a complex mechanism that contributes to the aggravation of tension (risk trigger) or the manifestation and/or escalation of conflict, which can be launched only when the addressee perceives the situation of change initiated by the addresser as a threat — which, in turn, creates the conditions for changing of actions, order of involvement and register. This opens up opportunities for influencing and managing the situation of change. A morphological analysis of triggers of the unfolding conflict made it possible to identify several groups determined by investment, institutional, normative, and value regulations. In a modern actively changing city, the investment-type trigger was empirically shown to be the most conflict-generating, with the first steps of project publicizing and proclamation having the greatest trigger potential. However, an analysis of the relationship between the nature of the trigger and the outcome of the conflict showed that conflicts caused in particular by the investment-type triggers have a higher probability of settlement. As a rule, private investors are more flexible in meeting the demands of the protesters than the authorities, especially if the investors do not rely on the unconditional support of the authorities. This does not negate the important issue of the poor quality of decision-making in conflict regulation. Just a few conflict actors aim to fix the balance, which is why only a small part of the conflicts ends with the search for a compromise; mostly the conflicts end with a complete victory of one of the parties or the cancellation of the project in favor of the protesters.

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