The article examines the processes of cultural appropriation — the adoption of artifacts, forms of cultural expression, and other elements of a foreign culture, as well as various modes of adapting heritage and integrating it into everyday life. Using the example of the Kaliningrad region, it is shown how complex relations with German cultural heritage influence both the work of urban activists engaged in preserving and restoring historical sites and the organization of city tours. The authors come to the conclusion that, despite the region’s high tourism potential, there are many competing ways of perceiving German heritage. City tours, to some extent, facilitate the appropriation of cultural heritage. In particular, one can observe not only a focus by tour agencies and private guides on medieval history and narratives of military glory, but also the emergence of various leisure formats in which city facades become attractive backdrops without direct references to historical events. Such adaptations may lead to a fragmented or distorted understanding of the region’s history, avoiding both idealization and demonization yet lacking a holistic perspective. Recently, more niche excursion routes and stories that reveal the history of the region in all the diversity of its cultural and historical layers have become popular. This model of appropriation is directly related to the practices of caring for monuments, their preservation by activists and their presentation as aesthetically appealing and socially engaging objects. The tourism product reflects shifting tastes, changing notions of authenticity and its display, and more broadly the overall strategy of appropriation.

This article examines the practices of popularizing Soviet modernist architecture (1950s–1980s) through the phenomenon of author-led tours. The study’s relevance stems from the growing public interest in this architectural legacy, coupled with escalating threats to its preservation. The aim is not to evaluate the effectiveness of these practices but to analyze the motivations, shared traits, and evolving perspectives of popularizers who operate outside any formal movement. Methodologically, the research is based on a qualitative analysis of transcripts from in-depth interviews with thirteen experienced guides specializing in Soviet modernism. A key methodological approach involved shifting the focus from individual “personas” to a “montage of statements”, identifying recurring themes across the interviews. The authors (and interviewers) — architectural historians with guiding experience themselves — adopt a reflexive position, treating their interviewees as both research subjects and intellectual co-authors. The analysis identified and systematized seven core metaphorical “pathways” through which the guides’ reflections can be conceptualized: tours as a journey into an imagined space; as a pathway for dialogue and exchange of opinions; as a route to acceptance and therapeutic reconciliation with the modernist environment; as a path to knowledge; as a means of community-building; as a path to identity, formed by negotiating the relationship between local context and international style; and finally, as a potential path to heritage preservation — or a refusal to assume this role. This article offers an internal view of the evolution of excursion practices and their role in the modern culture of fascination with Soviet Modernism. The study culminates in a polyphonic portrait of a community in a state of creative and intellectual flux. It shows how these practices serve not only to construct heritage narratives and community identity but also to develop a cooperative effort aimed at the preservation of Modernism. Ultimately, the article argues that within this context “retrotopia” operates not just as a nostalgic escape from reality but also as an instrument for critiquing contemporary urban planning.

This article presents a comprehensive study of the perception and conceptualization of participatory design practices among Russian urbanists belonging to the generation of its rapid institutionalization (2010s–2020s). This period, marked by the emergence of federal programs such as the “Formation of a Comfortable Urban Environment” and the “Competition for the Improvement of Small Towns and Historical Settlements,” shaped a new generation of professionals for whom citizen engagement became an integral yet problematic imperative. The empirical foundation of the research consists of 21 in-depth biographical interviews with informants from various professional backgrounds (architects, urban activists, sociologists, urban planners, etc.) working in both commercial and public sectors, with and without formal specialized education. One of the study’s key findings is the identification of a fundamental internal conflict within the professional self-consciousness of contemporary urbanists. The authors identify and describe two conflicting images of the profession: “urbanism-asscience,” striving for universal, transferable knowledge and solutions, and “urbanismas-practice,” focused on specific, unique, and context-dependent cases. This duality, theoretically framed through the concepts of “multiplicity” (Annemarie Mol) and the “division of worlds” (Bruno Latour), permeates all aspects of the respondents’ worldviews. The research demonstrates that, despite a unanimous recognition of the necessity of participatory design, there is a consensus lack within the community regarding its definition, methodology, and boundaries. This generates internal contradictions in responses to questions concerning gender equality, the role of municipalities, and the agency of citizens. Urbanists find themselves in a position where they are forced to simultaneously act as impartial experts (a “mouthpiece for facts”) and active political actors mediating diverse interests. Thus, the work reveals profound ideological and practical tensions that define the landscape of contemporary Russian urbanism.

The article discusses the use of affective mapping as a method for studying memory, loss, and spatial imagination among displaced residents of the Hadrut district of Nagorno-Karabakh after the 2020 war. Conducted in Yerevan and Stepanakert in 2022, the study focuses not on analyzing interview data but on understanding the act of drawing as a form of remembering.

Participants were invited to draw “their own Hadrut” — a subjective and emotionally charged image rather than a geographically precise one. The drawings were accompanied by storytelling, where the past intertwined with the present moment of narration and moving back and forth. This process revealed how bodily and emotional memories re-emerge through action, turning recollection into an embodied event.

We conceptualize these maps as idiospaces — personal topographies of memory analogous to idiolects in language. Each map conveys an individual mode of belonging and a way to re-experience and rearticulate connection to a place that no longer exists materially. Affective mapping thus enables the reconstruction of the emotional geography of everyday life before displacement and illuminates how gesture, narration, and shared empathy shape social memory. As a humanistic and anthropological practice, affective cartography becomes a space where personal remembrance is transformed into a collective act of imaginative return and re-inhabitation of home.

The article examines the concept of urban mediation as a form of guided activity that takes the shape of a walk involving active audience participation. It offers a brief history of the notion of mediation in cultural contexts and considers the applicability of this approach to guided tours. The purpose of urban mediation is defined as the opposite of a conventional tour: not to convey factual information but to stimulate personal engagement with and interpretation of a place. The article draws on the author’s own experience of conducting urban mediation and outlines its key principles, including the prioritization of discussion, the flexibility of the route, and the careful balance between intervening in and refraining from altering the environment under study. It also critically examines several common tour-related objectives, such as the desire to charm participants with selected sites, the pursuit of creativity and interactivity, and attempts to adapt urban mediation to a mass audience.

Urban mediation practices show that the need for mediating interventions arises primarily in spaces lacking an obvious historical narrative, where analytical interpretation is more in demand than a story of the “history of the place”. At the same time, mediation is rarely formulated as a clear request from the general public. The majority of participants (about two-thirds) find it difficult to shift from passive perception to open discussion, and this often results in dissatisfaction with the perceived lack of information. Simultaneously, an active minority emerges that responds positively to the discussion-based format and emphasizes its value. Reflections on the criteria of success reveal that an emphasis on quantitative indicators tends to redirect attention toward mass tourism, whereas the more “elitist” discussion-driven approaches, appreciated by a minority of participants, offer greater substantive value for the practice of urban mediation.

In February 2025, a launch seminar was held in Petrozavodsk to mark the beginning of the project We Remember. We Love. We Sorrow. The initiative promotes educational activities in the form of cemetery walks — guided tours through the section of honorary burials at the Petrozavodsk city cemetery. The seminar centred on exploring the thematic and conceptual foundations of these excursions, which aim to make this seemingly inconspicuous site of tangible forms of memory more visible to local residents. This paper analyses the discussion that took place during the seminar, in which necrospaces were approached as examples of scenarios where the cemetery landscape is both distinct from and embedded within the everyday life of the city. These intersections, both symbolic and material, are understood as practices that shape urban everydayness. As such, excursions into these spaces may be perceived as intrusions into a domain of separation and detachment, one governed by its own boundaries and implicit rules.

Over the past decade, Yekaterinburg has witnessed rapid growth in guided tours, which have become a defining feature of modern urban life. The article draws on the authors’ personal experience as tour guides and on long-term involvement in the excursion communities “Ekb-gulyayem” and “Territory of the Avant-garde”, both of which actively promote the city’s avant-garde architectural heritage in Yekaterinburg.

The discussion focuses on the formation of the tour guide community and its role in the life of the city, the development of diverse tour formats, shifting attitudes toward excursions as an updated and increasingly professionalized activity, the ways in which excursions shape both personal and professional identities, and the forms of interaction that emerge between tour guides and various urban environments, communities, and audiences.

The authors’ excursions function as a form of urban mediation. In the encounter between guide and residents, the city is continually ‘rediscovered’, and narratives about urban identity are formed. Local history and personal experience intersect with external, imported images (of the Bauhaus, of in Paris, of in Tel Aviv). On the one hand, this repositions the city and creates additional value; on the other hand, these narratives foster local communities around shared stories and draw new audiences into these discursive practices. Together with exhibitions and public events of the “Territory of the Avant-Garde” project, guided tours contribute to the formation of an urban narrative about Yekaterinburg as the “capital of constructivism” and help sustain a productive dialogue between the city’s past and its future.

This article and commented interview with Elena Evgenievna Zhigarina, a specialist in structural paremiology and folklore studies, offers an analytical reflection on methodological principles for recording and studying proverbs, bywords, sayings, and other paremiological units in contemporary urban discourse. The work examines the variability and polyfunctionality of paremias, the dynamics of the Russian paremiological fund in the twenty-first century, and the shifting boundaries of paremiological space across generations. It reveals methodological approaches to participant observation in field collection of paremias, discusses practical and ethical complexities of such methodology, and analyzes phenomena of occasional paremiological transformations and the ephemerality of contemporary paremiological material. Central to the interview is the question of how traditional folklore adapts and transforms in the age of internet culture and digital memes. The conversation critically addresses epistemological questions about knowledge production and researcher reflexivity — specifically, the tension between the “scholarly voice” and the “personal voice” in documenting and interpreting contemporary folklore. The work emphasizes the importance of thick description and intersubjectivity in folklore research. The study makes a significant contribution to contemporary debates in folklore studies, digital ethnography, and linguistic pragmatics, illuminating how traditional paremias persist, hybridize, and evolve within the context of contemporary collecting practices.

This article presents a critical review of the youth scientific conference “Metropolises III: Development and the New Urban Crisis,” organized by the Center for Urban Studies at Tyumen State University. The authors aim to uncover hidden yet significant “fault lines” in the contemporary understanding of development — not as a merely commercial real-estate activity, but as a complex, multidimensional process of urban space production. Central to the discussion is the figure of the developer, whose role extends beyond that of a traditional builder to include functions such as curator of cultural memory, research partner, marketer, and sometimes even facilitator. Drawing on an analysis of the conference presentations, the article identifies several key thematic directions: developers’ engagement with academia and universities; their use of placemaking tools — including commemorative practices and naming strategies — to create meaningful places and counteract placelessness; interactions with urban communities through both conflicts and participatory practices; and the emergence of “alternative” forms of development — Soviet-era, university-led, and informal. The review underscores the need to broaden the conceptual toolkit of urban studies by integrating alternative models of spatial production and demonstrates that development is not only an economic process but also a semiotic, political, and cultural one.