The three-year project focuses on studying the conditions provided by authorities, civil society and industrial companies for the well-being of young people in the Arctic region.
A group of anthropologists, geographers and legal experts from the Russian Federation and Finland have won a grant from the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (RFBR) to study young people from the Arctic industrial cities of the two countries. This was reported to TASS by one of the project participants, the head of the Northern Studies Department of the North-Eastern Federal University (NEFU), Mikhail Prisyazhny.
"We learned about the results of the competition among fundamental research projects of 2018 at the end of last year. The project, designed for three years, is aimed at studying the well-being of young people and the viability of Arctic industrial cities in Russia and Finland. The future and sustainability of these cities will depend on how the younger generation sees the prospects of their personal development. The project is aimed at understanding the “strategy to overcome" the problems of youth and more positive perspectives: the pursuit of happiness and opportunities, as today's young people want to get out of the constant survival regime”, - Mikhail Prisyazhny said.
The project aims to promote a broader theory of viable Arctic communities that integrate approaches from different disciplines of anthropology, legal research, geography and economics. "We will study how authorities, civil society and industrial companies create conditions for the well-being of young people and how they are perceived by young people themselves," - the source added.
According to Mikhail Prisyazhny, only recently the research community has paid some attention to the Arctic as a city space. Even less attention was paid before to the Arctic as a space in which young people make decisions - to live in these industrial cities that were created in the 20th century for mining or leave them behind.
Field work will take place in towns and urban settlements of Yakutia, Yamal, the Murmansk Region, as well as three cities in Finland. The team of researchers includes representatives of the NEFU, Petrozavodsk State University, and the Arctic Center of the Lapland University.
The task of the RFFI and the Finnish Academy competition is the development of international cooperation in the field of fundamental scientific research in the Arctic, and financial support of initiative research projects jointly implemented by scientists from Russia and Finland.
Experts believe that the Arctic area of Russia should become one of the centers for development of domestic innovations, and it will be possible to accelerate technological development in the Far North through providing environment that is comfortable to people. The program "Generating Comfortable Urban Environment" is one of the projects aiming at this purpose.
“The Russian Arctic is doomed to innovation: the extreme climatic conditions and enterprising people who venture to work in the North create an environment for the development of new technologies”, - said Nadezhda Zamyatina, deputy director of the Institute of Regional Consulting and leading research associate at the Geography Faculty of the Moscow State University.