‘The city council is doing their best to facilitate the construction of Yekaterinburg’s future Academic district,’ the spokesperson for Yekaterinburg municipal council Konstantin Pudov said to an UrBC reporter.

Renova Group’s Chairman Viktor Vekselberg recently reported to Russian President Dmitriy Medvedev on how the implementation of the project went along.

‘Our goal is to put up a city of the twenty-first century. This is an ambitious endeavor, but we have been able to face the challenge so far, despite the financing difficulties and the stock market problems. The project requires 11 billion RUR worth of investments altogether. The future district’s premises have already been connected to Yekaterinburg through a six-lane highway by now, the engineering infrastructure is nearly finished, and the electricity is fully available. The project provides for 100,000 new jobs, actually,’ Vekselberg said.

Renova’s executive suggested that such projects should be put on the state housing program list.

‘This would mean we could hope for the state support of each such project in the future,’ he noted.

‘The idea of multi-faceted area development alongside with a strategic investor was almost fully inspired by the mayor in the course of looking into Yekaterinburg’s General Development Plan for 2006-2025. Academic is now part of this plan, so both the city council and the strategic investor are focusing on the implementation of the project,’ Konstantin Pudov observed.