Residentiality Patterns and Residential Identity among the Dwellers of Saint-Petersburg

In this paper I investigate the phenomenon of residentiality among the dwellers of different neighborhoods of St. Petersburg using the Cultural Consensus Theory methodology, which combines quantitative and qualitative research methods. This approach is unconventional for the study of residentiality practices and is used to find similarities and differences in the cultural domains of two contrasting subgroups within the sample. The research heavily relies on the theoretical concepts from urban sociology, such as neighborhood effect and neighborhood identity. The other important theory which is being used is residentiality theory itself, mainly based on Vakhstayn’s definitions of it. In general, residentiality stands for the way people determine one’s residential status based on certain criteria in a given city or a neighborhood. A person is rather included in the social group, or excluded from it and being treated like a newcomer. I want to look at the patterns of residentiality existing in Saint-Petersburg, and also assess their cultural differences, which may stem from the socio-economic position of a neighborhood. To make all of that inside a bachelor thesis, I have decided to group several areas of the city in two contrast sets based on the official open source data about their socio-economic statistics. Two sets of areas were chosen for the study, consisting of three rather ‘affluent’ neighborhoods, and three disadvantaged ones. First group includes Centralny, Primorsky and Petrogradsky districts, and the second one such districts as Frunzensky, Nevsky and Kirovsky. A set of respondents of different ages and genders was collected from those neighborhoods for the cultural analysis procedures.