Efficiency assessment of urban planning transformations: economic and legal aspects

Introduction. A discrepancy between legislative requirements for the compulsory recognition of economic factors in the process of drafting urban planning documents, on the one hand, and the unavailability of an approved implementation procedure, on the other hand, makes a substantial impact on decision making processes that deal with urban planning transformations. The unavailability of (a) unified approaches to the assessment of the economic efficiency of urban planning solutions, (b) an approved efficiency assessment procedure or (c) a database decelerates the process of making well-grounded urban development decisions. Therefore, development of a conceptual framework for the efficiency assessment in terms of integrated urban development actions and their implementation procedures is particularly relevant. The subject of this research consists in the study of the regulatory/methodological framework of urban development, and its mission is to analyze the main regulatory problems that accompany the efficiency assessment of urban development. Materials and methods. The co-authors employed a socio-spatial approach that takes account of objective and subjective factors of a high-quality urban environment at various stages of the urban planning documentation drafting process. Within the framework of this approach, methods of comparative/logical analysis were applied, expert evaluations were made, materials, developed by foreign and Russian scientists, Russian legislative acts, methodological documents were studied with regard to the evaluation of the urban development efficiency. Results. The co-authors identified gravest theoretical and methodological problems of urban transformation efficiency assessment. An assessment procedure was developed. The co-authors suggested organizing the urban transformation efficiency assessment in the course of drafting urban planning documentation. Principal efficiency assessment stages were identified, and the main objectives of each stage were formulated. Conclusions. The novelty and practical relevance of this research reside in the fact that the co-authors have identified problems of the legal framework of assessment procedures and suggested a sequential estimation of the economic efficiency of urban transformations so that each subject of urban planning activities followed a unified research-driven decision making procedure.