Expanding methodological approaches to assessing the quality of socio-economic development strategies for large cities

We substantiate areas of improving the tools designed to assess the quality of socio-economic development strategies for large cities. In particular, we developed and tested a methodology for assessing the quality of socio-economic development strategies for large cities based on the principles of strategic planning and social corporatism. At the first stage, it involves analyzing the dynamics of key indicators of socio-economic development in large cities, reflecting the growth rates of the number of city residents (“Citizens” indicator, provides a comprehensive assessment of the dynamics of development and targets of the urban community); the number of registered enterprises and organizations in the city (“Business” indicator, provides a comprehensive assessment of the dynamics of development and targets of the entrepreneurial community); the volume of housing construction (“Municipality” indicator, provides a comprehensive assessment of the effectiveness of municipal management through land use, interaction with residents and construction companies), as well as the faith of people and investors in the city and its future. At the second stage, we assess the use of five main mechanisms of social corporatism in the development strategies of large cities via contextual analysis: project management, urban sociology, territorial public self-government, municipal-private partnership, participatory budgeting. At each stage, we arrange large cities into groups in accordance with the criteria under consideration. At the final stage, we design a “Strategy - Development” matrix and put forward proposals for finalizing the strategies of large cities, taking into account their features. The approbation of the methodology has shown the heterogeneity of the quality of strategic planning and the dynamics of socio-economic development in Russia’s large cities. This may indicate that they are all at different stages of development of social corporatism. Therefore, it is necessary to use different approaches, tools and directions when developing city strategies, taking into account their characteristics and potential.