Studies of Urban Identities in Siberian Urban History

This article considers the main results of identity research on Siberian urban history. The author identifies the seven most extensively developed topics in studying the history of urban identities. The first topic focuses on the formation of a city’s general identity in the initial stages of its formation. Historians aim to reveal the mechanisms of general city identification, as well as the sources, criteria, and values underlying the identity of a particular city. The second topic includes studies of the drift of urban production and industrial identities in the context of industrialization: quite often, it was industrial markers that determined the direction of a city’s identification. The third topic covers the study of ethnicity in urban spaces. Historians reveal the reaction of ethnicity to processes of adaptation and acculturation. The fourth issue concerns the study of gender identity in the context of the masculine orientation of urbanisation processes. Historians focus on the study of mechanisms underlying the dominance of masculine culture in the urban environment and the development of the socio-cultural significance and functions of women, their limitations and emancipation. The fifth topic concerns the identification of social stratification in urban systems. Urban history gains new knowledge through studies which examine urbanisation as a factor of differentiation in urban society and classical structures of society (estates and classes), as well as in works on the identification of the middle class, social mobility, the formation of marginal groups, and vernacular culture. The sixth topic is expanded by works dealing with the historical imagology of the city. Images are forms of identity representations in cultural and public discourses. Therefore, in studying them, urban history today makes a practical contribution to the development of modern urbanism. The seventh topic focuses on the historiographical analysis of the identification research strategies of urban historians themselves. In the process of revealing urban identities, the research model should be based on a wide range of sources of a predominantly narrative nature and the anthropological approach. It seems appropriate to use the potential of memoirs, oral history, periodicals, fiction, and journalistic literature. Studies on the identity palette of Russian urban history go beyond purely historical issues and are based on deep interdisciplinary interaction.