city

Introduction. The main topic of the article is conceptual difference between rural (village&hamlet) and urban (town&city) in the worldview of Russian civilization through referring to Alvin Toffler’s conception of The Third Wave. Theoretical review. In the horizons of stadial theory rural and urban are forms of settlement and they are the stages of ascending from savagery to civilization. Village and town are not only stable space locations for a human being, but also the stages of essential evolution of settlements.

The city provides a human capital reproduction, but the village does the population reproduction. We have applied a system-cybernetic approach to analyze the city-village interaction by means of the homeostatic type model. We present the proposals to optimize the system balance confirming with the reforms in Russian society as a whole.

The city is considered as complex synergetic self-organizing system in which the historical, economic, sociopolitical ecological and other laws coherently operate, causing by the joint action existence of mechanisms of functioning of city in general.

Is it possible to be surprised that cognitive interest in the problem of space, both theoretical and practical, remains stable and even steadily grows along with changes of the ways and character of spatial relations and connections in the society. And is it not natural that this mostly contradictory process depends not only on variability of social and spatial coupling, but also on the point of view of the investigators’ interest. All this opens up new ways of understanding the spatial aspect of social existence in urban conditions.