ECOM in St. Petersburg

[I first heard about ECOM during a research visit to an independent news agency in August 2005. During my research fieldwork in fall 2006, I could see that they were active all over the city in press conferences, public hearings, and citizen demonstrations. Many St. Petersburg news publications including Delovoi Peterburg and Ekspert now regularly solicit commentary from ECOM staff about developments in the city.]

Translated (by me) from the main ECOM blog at http://www.ecom-info.spb.ru/

The research center ECOM is a non-commercial organization. Its goal is the development of techniques that apply collective intelligence to decisions made by federal and local government authorities and entrepreneurs. One of the main aspects of the Center’s activity is the drafting of normative statements on ecology and city planning. ECOM has organized citizen research studies [impact statements] about the main city planning documents of St. Petersburg: the Master Plan, the Rules for Construction and Land Use, and legislation on the preservation of green spaces. ECOM specializes in nonstandard sociological techniques of public participation in decision-making, such as citizen and administrative public hearings, evaluation methods based on the participation of clients, citizen research, and others.

[ECOM’s actions and statements reveal the staff as bold independent thinkers who absorb what is useful to them from others’ practices and precedents. They believe in the potential of a market economic system to provide a useful system of incentives and opportunities, but they do not accept axioms of market inevitability (see below).]

Translated from Diary of an Ecoist,
a related blog at http://www.ecom-info.spb.ru/about/index.php?id=998

At a certain moment we realized that we are “ecoists.” Ecoism is when a person wants to live in an environment that is favorable for HIM or HER, without regard to “government interests” in economic development, ignoring the assertion that “progress cannot be stopped,” and not accepting as fact the UnConDitional InEvitaBility of the construction of new factories, roads, and so on. The chief motto of the ecoist is: “Whatever is good for Nature is good for me!”

How can such a person live in the contemporary world? And what should be done with the contemporary world so that we could live in it, and not merely survive? This is what we ponder on our informal blog, using the opportunity of live interaction with various people and participation in virtual break rooms/collectives.