Quality of Life in the Context of Socio-Cultural Developments of Small and Medium Towns in Russia.

Small and medium towns are the ground of structure of urban settlement in Russia. There are more than 27 mln. of inhabitants in 709 small towns and 163 medium towns. We suppose to find out main tendencies in cooperation between local authorities, local communities and local NGO which promote increasing of Quality of life. Our paper is based on complex sociological research with different methods and we analyzed as well organizational models of LG, socio-economic indicators and subjective characteristics. Geography of the research included 10 small and 16 medium towns from all federal districts of Russia.

Modern development of Russian small towns reflect common irregular unequal development of different territories in the country. Polulation of small towns has been reducing, efforts of local authorities are not effective.

In order to estimate level and quality of life in the small and medium towns we analysed the following indicators: life time and birth rate; level of unemployment and average salary and pension; quantity of people with income lower than living wage; social satisfaction ext.

We also pointed out main social problems common for all of towns as dexreasing of population and aging, lack of system policy of supporting of local enterprise and business, bad quality of roads, a lot of ramshackle buildings and old engineering infrastructure , bad health care and lack of infant schools.