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.

The behavior of brucite over wide ranges of temperatures and pressures is of great interest
for fundamental geochemistry and geophysics. Brucite layers and their octahedral Mg(OH)6 structural
units constitute an important structural part of layered dense magnesium hydrous silicates
(DMHS), which play a major role in mineral equilibria controlling water balance in the subduction
zones of the upper mantle. The ClayFF force field was originally developed for atomistic computer
simulations of clays and other layered minerals and their hydrated interfaces. The crystallographic
parameters of brucite at 25 C and 1 bar were used, among several others, to develop the original
ClayFF parametrization. Its new recent modification, ClayFF-MOH, can more accurately account for
the bending of Mg–O–H angles in the brucite structure, and it was used here to test the applicability
of this simple classical model over very wide ranges of temperature and pressure well beyond the
range of its original implementation (up to 600 C and 15 GPa). The pressure and temperature
dependencies of brucite crystallographic parameters, the compressibility of the crystal lattice, the
coefficients of thermal expansion, and the vibrational spectra were calculated in a series of classical
molecular dynamics simulations using the ClayFF-MOH model and compared with a diverse set
of available experimental data, including X-ray diffractometry, neutron scattering, IR and Raman
spectroscopy. These new results demonstrated that ClayFF-MOH, as simple and approximate as it is,
can be quite accurate in predicting many mineral properties at subduction zone conditions, which
greatly expands the area of its applicability.

This chapter describes the development cycles of cities in the Siberian North. These cycles are typically connected to the boom-and-bust cycles in associated natural resource development. I discuss the oil and gas cities of the Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous Okrug “Ugra,” the Yamal peninsula, the Yenisei North (Igarka, Dudinka), and Dickson on the northern sea route. Using ethnographic interviews, I analyze the characteristics of different phases of development and changes in the social sphere and the mood of citizens across these phases and geographic areas. I discuss on the peculiarities of urban development in Siberia based on different resource exploitation histories and the possibilities of moving to a post-raw material stage of development in the Siberian North.  

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.