Vitaly Mutko

City is a manifestation of the national project. Everyone should get involved and contribute to the comfortability of urban environment. The government began allocating budget funds for these projects. Over these years, we are going to spend more than 300 billion roubles on creation of comfortable urban environment. <…> By 2024, we need to ensure that 50% of our cities have comfortable environment

Speaking of new construction, we have to double it and in five years create a third of housing fund; so, there is no question we cannot do that without comprehensive territory development and territory renovation

Last year, we launched a training programme called ‘Architect of Russia’; 105 people have already gone through the training. Forty of them are now holding positions of architects in various small towns. <…> And this year we are launching another batch of 100 people

Rating is an important affair as it is a business assessment when each region takes a kind of exam

From time to time we come up with something, we research, we have new teams join federal subjects... All of these tried and tested practices can be taken and immediately implemented. This year, 77 regions in the Russian Federation submitted over 700 projects to the competition. These are truly best practices, which have the support of local municipalities, federal subjects, but the most important thing is, that these are completed projects. They can then be collected and shared across Russia

The strategy highlighted 12 macro-regions, then each region got its definition. These are promising regions, these are geostrategic regions. But the main point is, the key goal in the coming years is to get rid of the differences in socio-economic development and living standards between different regions as soon as possible

We agreed to stop regulating the regions’ authority from the top-down; we agreed that there will be no more decisions that are not tied to specific financing. If we are making decisions, we need to transfer a corresponding source of income

There is a number of problems: administrative barriers, excessive pressure on business, additional checks, and we have been talking about this for the last several years, just passing the problem around