‘The Greater Yekaterinburg project will help the local towns to fight unemployment. We all know that people who have lost their jobs during the recession are now coming to the capital of the Urals, Yekaterinburg, in search of work. In fact, the delinquency statistics available can serve as the circumstantial evidence of my claim: according to these data, 50% of local offenders are actually not Yekaterinburg dwellers,’ Director of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Ural branch Institute of Economics Alexander Tatarkin said to UrBC reporters.

Now the project provides for the merger of Yekaterinburg, Verkhnyaya Pyshma, Sredneuralsk, Berezovskiy, and Aramil into one conurbation of Greater Yekaterinburg.

‘Another advantage of the merger lies in the new development prospects for the towns involved. For one, Degtyarsk is literally dying at the moment. This town can be compared with a post-war settlement: abandoned production facilities, broken windows, and unkempt trees. People have to use everything available to make a living and it is already noticeable that they are gradually growing wild. The locals no longer think of development and going back to a normal and healthy lifestyle. They all need a helping hand and some jobs; Yekaterinburg can do this,’ Tatarkin noted.

‘I feel that, from the economic viewpoint, the right thing to do would be to prevent the city from getting even more environmental stress and to offer expanding companies production sites in the nearby towns and not in Yekaterinburg, which would create jobs for the locals. The so-called working-class districts, as the regional towns are popularly known, will therefore be provided with jobs, training, transportation, and infrastructure. This means the outskirts of Yekaterinburg will reach the living standards of the Urals’ capital,’ he observed.