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.

We used an eye-tracking technique to investigate the effect of green zones and car ownership on the attrac-tiveness of the courtyards of multistorey apartment buildings. Two interest groups—20 people who owned a car and  20  people who did  not  a  car—observed 36  images of  courtyards. Images were digitally modified to manipulate the spatial arrangement of key courtyard elements: green zones, parking lots, and children’s play-grounds. The participants were asked to rate the attractiveness of courtyards during hypothetical renting de-cisions. Overall, we investigated whether visual exploration and appraisal of courtyards differed between people who owned a car and those who did not. The participants in both interest groups gazed longer at perceptually salient playgrounds and parking lots than at greenery. We also observed that participants gazed significantly longer at the greenery in courtyards rated as most attractive than those rated as least attractive. They gazed significantly longer at parking lots in courtyards rated as least attractive than those rated as most attractive. Using regression analysis, we further investigated the relationship between gaze fixations on courtyard elements and the attractiveness ratings of courtyards. The model confirmed a significant positive relationship between the number and duration of fixations on greenery and the attractiveness estimates of courtyards, while the model showed an opposite relationship for the duration of  fixations on  parking lots. Interestingly, the  positive association between fixations on  greenery and  the attractiveness of courtyards was significantly stronger for participants who owned cars than for those who did not. These findings confirmed that the  more people pay attention to green areas, the more positively they evaluate urban areas. The results also indicate that urban greenery may differentially affect the preferences of interest groups.

The transition to market economy in the post-socialist countries marked the need for the formation of property rights, a legal real estate market and therefore zoning and land-use regulation system. Subsequently, the process of land subdivision has started, and continues up till the present moment. This paper is focused on the practises of land division in two types of territories in Russian cities – that of historic cores and Soviet large housing estates. In post-soviet economy the consequence of the privatization policy shows that it is focused on the premises by themselves, but not the buildings and plots. In this article we highlight the spectrum of problems connected to this phenomenon, focusing on those related to management, financing, and renewal of territories.

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.