UrBC, Yekaterinburg, August 18, 2010. ‘Trying to introduce some urban sprawl is not worth the candle. It is a pointless thing to do; the sprawl won’t do any good. If there exists a worthy project, it is the one of Greater Yekaterinburg as a single municipality,’ Mayor of Yekaterinburg Arkadiy Chernetskiy said at a press conference.
At the same time, Mayor of Berezovskiy Vyacheslav Brozovskiy suggested that the fifteen satellites around Yekaterinburg should be merged into a mega-city.
‘The benefits of a merger are self-obvious, and our common sense must win. The only problem is that this common sense has to be made obvious to all the local citizens. When I voice the project, for some reason everyone thinks that this means Chernetskiy wants to overlord the satellites. In fact, Chernetskiy does not want to overlord anything. What I do want is a city with some much greater development potential than that of Yekaterinburg alone or that of Berezovskiy alone,’ the Mayor explained.