On August 1, KFU hosted International Seminar “University's Role in Urban Development and Planning in Russia and Europe”.
The seminar was moderated by John Round, Senior Lecturer of the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences of the University of Birmingham (h-index 16). The scientist is a member of the KFU International Council and heads the recently founded Comparative Urban Research Lab.
The international Comparative Urban Research Lab opened in Kazan Federal University in 2014. It is the first Russian international centre for urban studies to invite leading experts in this area. The major lab's partner is the University of Birmingham. The researches here are notable for the complex approach to dealing with a problem.
The above mentioned seminar is the first fruit of the international lab that is aimed to provide high quality study of the problems a developing city is facing. The laboratory is already addressing the generation of a social and economic map of a large city territory using up-to-date geoinformational and neural network technologies. Some of the researches held in the lab were presented at the seminar.
The project “Economic Activities Analysis in the Context of Transformation of Regional Development in Tatarstan” was presented by Azat Safiullin, Doctor in Economics, who stressed that the complex analysis was used to study the problems within the given project. Elena Noskova introduced “Social Challenges and Health”, whereas speaking on the research “Ecological and social issues in the context of urban development planning”, Kirill Maltsev described in detail the process of inventing a special method to treat crucial issues of geomorphometry zoning and mapping.
The first progress report of the lab's activity will be presented at the second international seminar in November that will gather researchers from the University of Birmingham (Prof. David Hannah, Phil Jones, Martin Muller, Lauren Andres) and the heads of Tatarstan's cities and districts municipalities.