The article is devoted to identifying the peculiarities of the city’s cultural code empirical research. The appeal to the cultural code opens up the prospect of exploring the city as a symbolic space, saturated with citizens’ images, associations and impressions. Studies of the city’s cultural code as a system of city meanings, combining different city’s iconic systems (nature, history, architecture), spheres and levels of their functioning (mythological, philosophical, everyday) allows to decipher the city as a whole, revealing its uniqueness. The author not only defines the city cultural code’s empirical analysis directions, demonstrates the significance of this kind of research by studying the citizens’ deep ideas about the city but also cites the experience of conducting the Veliky Novgorod and St. Petersburg’s cultural code empirical study. The article opens up the prospect of the Russian cities’ cultural code for further empirical studies, the knowledge of which is an intellectual resource in the processes of forming urban identity and positioning the city in the external environment.
cultural code; cultural memory of the city; image of the city, urban identity