A couple of weeks ago, an open seminar “The City of Tomorrow. The Image of the Future” took place at Tomsk State University. The goal was not only to discuss the main trends in the formation of new, advanced living spaces but also to try to find a general framework for what is happening in this regard on the global scale. Although universities and high-tech businesses perceive these trends in different ways, there is something they share to make it possible to work together on creating new spaces. Those who produce knowledge and teach, and those who produce advanced technologies and innovative products need a specific environment related to the quality of life, values ​​, and a certain psychological and aesthetic atmosphere. This discussion helped us understand what our needs are and what we need to do to get them met.

Big University and the world-class campus is also a long-term project which will be discussed with the government of the Russian Federation in June. Therefore, the seminar, despite its visionary theme, was also of practical importance. It was a conversation about the next steps into the decade or even the century that our city should make with our help. TSU representatives from the Research and Education Center for Urban Studies and Regional Development, city administration, and Sergei Ivanov, executive director and member of the board of directors of the Efko group of companies attended the event. In this issue of the blog, I want to share thoughts that were voiced at the seminar.

Today, Tomsk has come to one of the most important milestones in its history. We stand at a crossroads deciding what our city will be in 30, 50, and even 100 years. The question is not only what will be the trajectory of its development, but also whether it will remain on the map as a city or will it gradually become provincial with a glorious past, and an unpromising future. After all, this was the city's outlook before the Imperial Tomsk University was founded. It became a place of attraction for young people and the intellectual elite, who formed the community that we are proud of today.

For us, the fact that Tomsk is a university city is a given which we started taking for granted a long ago. And it seems like it cannot be otherwise. In fact, global competition in higher education and modern technologies allows applicants, scientists, and teachers to choose places to study and work not only in Russia but all over the world. They can obtain a degree as full-time students and also through distance learning. It means that to remain an attractive place for young talents and highly qualified researchers and teachers, Tomsk must offer not only high-quality education and job vacancies but also certain additional advantages - an attractive, comfortable, interesting, and safe environment. These are the characteristics that the future Big University and a world-class campus will need to possess. The key role of the university is to find such methodological and cultural grounds for their creation so that all opponents of this idea (It is well-known that there are quite a few of them.) are able to recognize the importance of this project for the prosperity of Tomsk and the entire region.

We regularly discuss the principles of developing university cities and the specifics of urban ecosystems that are designed as places for specific qualities of human capital to be produced. These issues are discussed, for example, during the special strategic sessions of the annual international Forum of University Cities at TSU. However, each time there are more and more questions as the global contextual framework expands. The main reason for that is the changing global socio-political agenda. Meanwhile, we need concrete solutions, because the Big University project in Tomsk and the corresponding campus space is gaining new momentum. To carry out the project, it is necessary to choose the correct benchmarks, which are world trends in the formation of state-of-the-art living spaces. It is necessary to have an idea of ​​the most successful cases in this regard.

It is worth mentioning that the topic of organizing spaces today has become popular not only among representatives of the relevant professional spheres but also among the users of these spaces. One may notice from the continuous discussions around certain plans or implemented projects for the arrangement of urban areas on social networks. Sometimes these discussions become pretty heated. This also happened with the topic of the inter-university campus. Some Tomsk residents support the idea, others resist and even reject it. And this also needs to be taken into account, since public opinion on the territorial structure is not just information background for the activities of the city and regional administration, the architectural and construction organizations, and the owners of contracts. This is a reflection of how much the citizens want to participate in the implementation of such projects and to create the necessary social context for them.

So, all of us - the advanced high-tech businesses, the university, and the residents of Tomsk - feel that something is happening to the environment. On the one hand, the city continues to attract young people and those who can produce knowledge and technology. However, on the other hand, the question of the need to develop a special environment that provides people with a high quality of life and an atmosphere consistent with their life values ​​is being raised more and more often. In other words, there is a demand for such an environment, and the university, as the main stakeholder and one of the executors of this order, must help all participants to see some common framework and to better understand their needs. We need to answer the question: what can attract people to the Tomsk Region, despite the difficult climatic conditions that they will need to overcome? By the way, the remoteness of Tomsk and its provinciality do not at all prevent it from becoming a real center of attraction. Moreover, studies show that all authentic university cities with relatively small populations are located far from the capitals. Think of the compact Oxford and Cambridge with their idyllic landscapes. As for the Siberian extreme environment in terms of climate, it helps the development of a strong personality and readiness to overcome difficulties. International students from even the warmest countries quickly get used to our harsh climate and even turn it into a part of their reputation. They feel proud that they studied in Siberia.

In lieu of options for the development of the city and the region, it is possible to use the present-day experiences, which were presented at the seminar by Daria Chernikova, Deputy Director of the TSU Center for Urbanism and Regional Development. They were interesting cases based mainly on the concept of sustainable development and high-tech solutions that provide the environment for a healthy lifestyle, a good upbringing, and education. However, those were examples of successfully developing territories, but they were not university cities. They were more about form (infrastructure, technologies, etc.) than about content, that is, culture and values. We need to rely on content since a Siberian city can hardly compete with places with better climate and more stable urban-planning traditions. The latter, by the way, is very strongly related to climate, which can significantly limit the ability to "dream and create broadly." It is worthwhile to recall the idea of building a pedestrian bridge between the future campus on the left bank of the Tom River and the city, which can be implemented if appropriate technical solutions are involved, taking into account the low temperature and wind force during winter. There are such cases, for example, in China, where they construct very complex pedestrian bridges.

There is another important aspect: with the implementation of the strategy for the sustainable development of the city, it is important to have large resources and appropriate residents - high-tech companies. We do not have many of these, but we do have a university environment. We must proceed from goal-setting, meanings, and types of people whom we would like to attract. These are people who are ready to work, able to resist the existing trends of simplification, that is, those who do not thoughtlessly follow others. By the way, Sergei Ivanov also spoke about this. His company is looking for such people, and we have common interests in this. We need to unite our efforts to create and develop a new type of human capital.

We are looking for the basis for taking the next step towards the development of the city. The basis could be history, cultural values, traditions, and the energy of a university city located at the intersection of Europe and Asia. We have advocated for them and will continue to do that as a classical university.

In this regard, I remember the beginning of the 5-100 Program, when experts urged us to close the university choir, so we could direct finances to more “essential” directions. For example, opening  another laboratory. It seemed only logical: why disperse resources? We are a research university, not a philharmonic! But we decided not to destroy the university's cultural values ​​and traditions. We did not go for the supposed increase in efficiency due to the simplification that is seen today in science, education, and business. This is a general global trend with a very sad impact on all spheres outside of these.

Of course, freedom of choice allows students to decide how to build their educational track and choose what they like and what they do not. It is very comfortable for them. However, as a result, graduates are unviable as professionals in terms of possessing complex thinking and hard skills. They need additional training. I thought that such examples were exceptions, but they have turned out to b a trend. Fundamental education should be based on values, on the model of a complex person, capable of going beyond the boundaries of his or her profession. We call it transfessionalism and try to figure out how to design the right environment for that. We suggest that decision-makers consider all the components that have been mentioned above in urban-planning policy, the organization of living spaces, and the campus as a kind of anchor of the environment.

We are talking about designing an innovation district as an ecosystem that will be an engine of the new economy of the city and the region. With this in mind, the campus will become the core of the design and development of this innovation district, attracting high-tech companies. This is a story for decades to come. Meanwhile, the campus will be "overgrown" with new infrastructure and filled with a common ideology - technological, architectural, and value-semantic. Such an innovation district will radically transform both the city and its significance on a national scale.

I hope that through joint efforts we will be able to bring these plans to life.

In the second part of this issue of the blog, I would like to give the floor to Sergei Ivanov by presenting a short transcript of his speech at the seminar:

“Why is our company interested in urban studies? We produce food and our planning horizons are distant: our development program spans the next 20-30 years. And when one starts thinking on such a time scale, it is necessary to imagine how the social environment will look and how the living space will be organized in perspective, as it affects both the culture of consumption and the environment in which our people will work and live.

Now we have almost 20,000 employees, and we realize that we must develop. We need answers to the questions about the challenges we face in terms of personnel policy. In particular, what trends will determine consumer preferences and what should be done in general?

So why do cities attract people? At the seminar, a very controversial statement was made. It proclaims that cities appeared because uniting is in human nature. Adam Smith would disagree with this, considering that the primary reason for the emergence and development of cities is profit. The statistics that Smith cited in his works proved that the most successful are those that designate their specialization. The higher the specialization is, the richer, more efficient, and more sustainable a city becomes. This applies both to scientific and educational activities and the concept of a university city.

By the way, our company positions itself as provincial. Our headquarters is located near Alekseevka, the second office was opened in Voronezh, and only after that - in Moscow. We never tried to move  our central office to the capital, because we realized that the clarity of thoughts there would be ‘clouded’. One needs to work in the space where the company was born. Then we realized that deurbanization trends began to appear. We believe this trend will grow: life outside the city is healthier and better corresponds to the idea of sustainable development.

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I myself lived in the countryside until the age of 16, then literally fled from there, because I wanted to go to the city, to the center of life. I lived in Moscow too. Last year, due to the pandemic, I, like many townspeople, had to move to the county-side again. And I thought: a village is not an abstract silence, but rather a space from which the city looks completely different. It looks like an aggressive, ultra-noisy environment, in which there is no time to think or even to feel. You are being led all the time. To understand what a city is, one must first of all define who we are - what we know about ourselves, how our social norms and values ​​are transformed, and how such a small social form like a family is transformed. Finding answers to these questions is also important for determining what a city can use to attract and how to participate in the formation of human capital.

The first thing we propose in our training center is to determine the essence and nature of people - to realize that we are conditionally competent about our actions, thoughts, and feelings. In other words, we do not always do what we would like to, we cannot always control our thoughts and feelings.

Who is a “postmodern person” and what challenges does the current situation pose to us? We conducted a study with a sample of about 350 people (by the way, conducting research can be one of the areas of cooperation with the university) and came to unexpected conclusions. It seemed to us that only about 30% of people in Russia are oriented towards the values ​​of postmodernism - life is an eternal holiday, the absence of authority, etc.. Such persons are close to the ideas of human-centeredness and the absence of hierarchy. But among the respondents there were about 70%! Why is it important? Such people initially strive for comfort, they have no desire to overcome anything. As a result, they have no ability to go through our development program. They could, but they disconnect. It is impossible to train such people to become top-level leaders so that they will take over the leadership in a few years.

Let's get back to Tomsk and to how it may attract young people and professionals. Tomsk is a very large “village” in the good sense of the word, with all the positive coloring that can be brought into this expression. People are different here. And, of course, Tomsk has many universities that will constitute the Big University in the future. Together we must explore social trends, transformation in society, and the demand for ideas and the organization of living and working spaces.

What should not be done, in any case, is bringing anybody here forcefully. This is an alternative form of life: it is important and comfortable to some to live in a place with many people around. Leaving it, people feel deprived of air. At some point in the past, we had an illusion: we created the so-called Science City and thought that if science was so important to researchers, they would come to us. After all, we had all the conditions: there was no need to think about reagents; about equipment; just to act upon ideas! Everything would be done immediately upon request! One could just do their work! It seemed to us that those scientists who needed such working conditions would be interested in it, and they would all come to us. Those who needed to party would stay in Moscow. It took a while to realize that this was not the case. Real scientists also need communities, like-minded people, that is, an environment.

We are engaged in exclusive recruiting, which is the selection of young people 18-25 years old (sometimes up to 30), who are predisposed to becoming shareholders of our company and its top managers in the future. This is a targeted search. It is a one-year recruitment program for 30-50 people and this number is considered to be optimum . You now have 60,000 students in Tomsk, but you need at least 100,000 of them. To reach this number, it is necessary to “conjure” these people with traditional values by making a ‘funnel’ here. If you manage to create such a center in Tomsk, then you will gather young people from all over the world. This is a very interesting task, very important. This is a great ideological challenge because there are few such people anywhere, but they still exist.”

TSU as a classical university is aware of the importance of the values ​​that Sergei Ivanov spoke about. We resonate with management trajectories based on the ideas of the key role of culture in the organization. This dialogue is mutually enriching for us. It is very important to build relationships with companies that need sense-bearing employees with mature thinking because only such people can ensure the long-term development of organizations. We deal with high-hume technologies, which allow people to literally build themselves through education and training. We create a certain package of technical solutions and put them into practice. This is what we have always done, but in "manual mode". Now is the time to take these processes to a new level. By understanding modern technological solutions and high-hume technologies, together with like-minded partners, it is possible to create such spatial environments that will attract people of a certain “scale”. The result of this great work will be a fundamentally new quality of human capital in our city and region.

Eduard Galazhinskiy, TSU Rector, Acting President of the Russian Academy of Education

Translated by Snezhana Hosova