In Yekaterinburg (as well as in other Russian cities) town planners have have forgotten how to build urban streets. It’s a pity, given that the public space of the city mainly consists of streets and it’s the streets that most of us urban dwellers have to deal with everyday. If we don’t get the streets right we will have little chance of building a truly livable city.
First of all it is necessary to define the street. For the purposes of this text I propose the following definition. A street is a multifunctional linear public space formed by buildings’ frontages. That definition itself holds the problems that we’re going to discuss.