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Города расходящихся улиц: развитие городских конфликтов в России 2010-х.
Conflicts over the urban environment have become part of the everyday life of large Russian
cities. Infill construction, the demolition of historical and architectural heritage, the
demolition of parks and other public spaces are often accompanied by mobilization of
citizens, to which, in turn, both public authorities and developers are forced to react. Third
parties often interfere in the conflict - governors, political parties, or public organizations. In
addition, mobilization unfolds in different urban contexts, with varying degrees of intensity
and duration. Finally, the outcome of attempts to challenge development projects can also be
very different: some projects are implemented without any changes, others are not
implemented at all. How can we organize information about multiple urban conflicts, taking
into account the characteristics of context and dynamics, without losing the ability to
compare these episodes with each other in an analytical manner? In this article, we describe
the methodology for creating a database «Urban Conflicts in Russia» based on the analysis of
contentious episode analysis (CEA), proposed by H. Kriesi and his colleagues as a middle-
level methodology for studying mobilization. We describe the conceptual and methodological
foundations and also illustrate the analytical capabilities of the database. We demonstrate that
the design of the database, which includes both the characteristics of the context and the
conflict itself and the interactions of participants in conflict episodes with each other, allows
to switch between the macro-, meso- and micro-levels of analysis, make systematic
comparisons and identify patterns in the trajectories of urban conflicts. We show empirically
that episodes of challenging urban development projects follow a variety of scenarios, not
necessarily leading to victory or domination by developers and their allies in power. Just as in
Borges' Garden of Forking Paths, where the future splits into variations of the world that
multiply in the process of individual choices, so urban conflicts move along multiple
trajectories that are tied to moments of critical path choice.