Social Factors of Monotown Development

Abstract

A single-industry town, or monotown, is a socio-economic system that possesses specific goals and functions as vectors of its development. In this connection, relatively new social requirements appear along with the traditional evolutionary factors. These new requirements involve conditions for the formation of human capital assets, the level of sociocultural infrastructure, the quality of urban communities, and the degree of development of communications. Therefore, the list of strategic criteria for the development of single-industry towns should include indicators of the quality of the social sphere and the quality of life of the population. The research develops evaluation approaches based on identification of the concept and definition of the structural components of the urban social sphere. The paper proposes methods for forecasting the level of the social infrastructure of a single-industry city. The study features the case of Shakhty, a large mining community in the Rostov region. The research defines the necessity for monitoring the dynamics of the development of the social sphere in single-industry towns, formulates groups of criteria for effectiveness management, summarizes the principles of their scaling, and provides recommendations for evaluation of the socio-economic development level. An analysis of the dynamics of the social sphere development in a single-industry town should become an adequate non-ideological integral social and economic criterion for the effectiveness and efficiency of municipal management.