QUALITY OF LIFE MAPPING FOR BETTER SOCIAL PLANNING IN TYUMEN CITY, RUSSIA

The paper was focused on the methodological approaches to create cartographic databases of quality of life indicators in the city. Towns and cities were observed as social systems that stimulated foundation of communities and societies in the form of interrelation of their members and as a means, mechanism and objective-oriented activity of all participants of the urban area in achieving development objectives. In this study, the analysis of subjective indicators was conducted in Tyumen city. Tyumen, with population of over 700.000 people, is a capital of the Tyumen region - a vast oil and gas-rich Western Siberian province. Methodological basis for social mapping in the practice of municipal management was a combination of social constructivism ideas and actor-network theory, namely, the need for mutual recognition of the real material and non-material elements of social space according to the tradition of P. Bourdieu. The applied social mapping method allowed to identify areas of social tension, spatial distribution pattern of the main elements of the social infrastructure in each district of the city to determine the critical (in terms of opportunities for human development) areas, conduct an expert assessment of the quality of the selected objects of social infrastructure and reflect the results on a map. And cartography was thus allowed to address a variety of different needs ranging from visualization, readability and communication to forecasting.