Major city development forecast: designing the innovative future

The article describes the results of application of the authors' approach to forecasting the development of the city (in the case of one of the largest Russian cities - Ekaterinburg). The main results of the development of multi-variant long-term forecast of Ekaterinburg socio-economic development are presented: the provisions of the approach used to create such documents are set out, a brief description of the forecasting methodology is given, the key aspects of city life in the context of the proposed development scenarios are forecasted, the main risks of long-term development of the city are described. The study is based on the use of the whole set of forecasting methods such as mathematical modeling, balance and cohort-component methods, extrapolation methods and expert evaluation method. The article describes the situation in Ekaterinburg regarding other cities and evaluates key development prospects of a municipal unit. It is recommended to use the approach based on the given scenario “junctions” (each of which gives two alternative scenarios); this helped identify eight options for the city transformation...