Faculty of Urban and Regional Development

Cities possess massive resources, talent and creativity and serve as hubs for knowledge sharing, experimentation and innovation, generating new ideas, embedding these solutions locally and scaling-up successful practices. Cities, however, are not abstract sustainability-making machines; they are places where real people live, work, study and flourish. Cities are made of people, by people and for people. Sustainable measures will have to make sense to inhabitants of cities, making their life more liveable. Furthermore, it is people who drive sustainability and who are its ultimate source and beneficiaries. This vision underpins the notion of people-smart sustainable cities, introduced in this publication.

This paper examines the transformations of contemporary cultural policy in the Russian Federation on three basic levels: organizational, politico-discursive, and legislative. It also establishes the continuity and differences in that policy vis-à-vis the Soviet period. The principal thesis of this article is that the organizational behavior of the state sector of cultural policy currently seeks to reproduce the model that emerged in the final period of the USSR’s existence. State cultural organizations competing for state resources publicly demonstrate ritualistic ceremonial behavior in relation to political discourse and the established legal system, but at the same time avoid direct ideological instrumentalization of their activities, while seeking to support, update, and expand their network.

Thearticle presents a special modification of the EOQ-formula for the optimization of deliveries when renting storage facilities is presented. This modification will allow taking into account the specifics of the following processes of the simulated supply chain: 1) vehicle cargo capacity; 1) time value of money; 2) deferred payment of the order; 3) allowable delays in receipt of revenue from the executed order. The corresponding optimization procedures were carried out concerning the inventory management system that considered the scenario when the schedule of outgoing and incoming cash flows allows paying the costs of the supply chain from the proceeds received on the reorder interval. Necessary and sufficient conditions are established based on which managers will be able to identify models of the specified type.

Financial losses due to low demand for parking spaces in garages at residential estates is a key motivation for this research. The purpose of this paper in particular is to statistically explore the relationship between parking occupancy rates and various factors on transport supply, characteristics of location and the building. The occupancy rate of parking was measured as the ratio of actual number of cars to total number of parking spaces. The fieldwork on counting occupied parking spaces was conducted 2 times per day during a week on a sample of 13 locations in different areas of a 1.4-million Yekaterinburg city in Russia. 4700 observed parking spaces give sample size of 173 records. Statistical analysis shows that the crow-fly distance to the city center as well as the number of public transport stops are strongly associated with occupancy rate for parking. Also, occupancy rate is much more affected by the type of parking ownership. Private owning means purchase of a parking space or renting it while public ownership suggests free access. So private parking means a 45% decline in occupancy compared to the public parking regime. Research provides empirical results and some theoretical underpinnings are also highlighted.