‘A multi-faceted area development project is something we should have come up with a long time ago. The sporadic housing construction problems large cities are struggling with are all rooted in failing to switch to the multi-faceted area development principle in time. We could have avoided quite a few complications if we had not kept overwhelming the Soviet-time engineering infrastructure with so many new buildings,’ First Deputy Head of Sverdlovsk Region Government and Minister of Economics and Labor Mikhail Maximov announced in the course of a press conference in Yekaterinburg.

‘Multi-faceted area development is the path all the large cities will be moving in. Twenty-two such projects (two of them in Sverdlovsk Region) have already been designed and prepared for implementation in Russia, which is definitely a good thing. Sverdlovsk Region-based Academic is, in fact, Russia’s largest multi-storey housing project,’ the Minister said.

‘These housing projects make the idea of internal migration much more appealing. We are offering better living conditions, thus keeping the existing workforce in the region as well as luring in more people from the country’s other regions,’ he added.