‘The application committee gathers data and monitors the state of Yekaterinburg’s infrastructure on a regular basis in order to prepare a candidate city’s profile. We use the official data obtained from the publicly open sources and provided by the municipal and the regional authorities,’ EXPO 2020 Application Committee’s Deputy Director-General Alexander Vyakhirev told UrBC.

‘The city’s readiness to host EXPO 2020 is evaluated on the basis of quite a few criteria, including not only the state of the infrastructure but also some other socio-economic indicators and the data on education, science, and culture. It is not the application committee’s task to assess the state of the infrastructure such as, for example, the quality of road pavement. We only analyze the data and work with the information we have gathered. The issue of evaluating the quality of roads is something that the municipal and the regional authorities are in charge of,’ he added.

‘The application committee is also not responsible for exerting pressure on the regional and city authorities in order to make them take additional urban development measures. When designing our EXPO Park, we use the general town planning scheme and only adjust the scheme a bit to ensure their rapid implementation within EXPO 2020 program,’ Vyakhirev said.