Press centre News

December 7-9, 2011, in Moscow, under the auspices of the Moscow Government and Government of the Russian Federation, the first Moscow international urban forum "Global Solutions for Russian cities" was hosted. The Moscow City Government, Urban Land Institute (Institute of Urban Land, a nonprofit research and educational organization), and consulting company IRP Group were the organizers of the forum.

The Moscow Urban Forum was initiated in order to facilitate the development of cities in Russia and former Soviet Union and to enhance their competitiveness. The Forum was a platform for discussing current trends of contemporary urbanism, for introducing the professional community to the latest technology and the best global practices of the urban development. The event represented an important step in establishing trends in Russian transformation of the urban environment and the development of Moscow as a global city of international business, finance, communications, and culture.

Representatives of the federal and regional authorities, the mayors of cities of Russia, CIS and foreign countries, the heads of architecture and city planning offices, real estate and construction companies, the leading Russian and foreign experts in urban environment  spoke at the forum.

Discussions and presentations at the forum were divided into five sections:

• Funding and management
• Planning and construction
• Infrastructure and technology
• Identity and Marketing
• Sustainable development

Each of the section had an assigned expert who, on behalf of the participants of the section, presented the set of solutions and technologies for the development of Russian cities at the final plenary session.

Albert Eganyan, Managing Partner of VEGAS LEX, participated in the first Moscow International Urban forum as an expert and moderated the session "How to prepare a city for a mega event". The participants discussed issues related to the Football World Cup which would be held in 2018. The experts of this session were:

• Debra Mountford, program manager for the development of regional economy and employment, OECD
• Joe Montgomery, chief executive officer of ULI Europe
• Kacharov Gregory, senior vice president of the Organizing Committee of Sochi - 2014
• Dzhanpetro Borghini, a former mayor of Milan, a member of the Organizing Committee for Expo 2015.

Albert Eganyan also made a presentation at the session "Financing the cities: public funding and private investment" (section "Financing and Management"), describing what PPP tools were successfully used in the cities around the world and what Russia could use.

Among the speakers and moderators of the second day at the event were Elvira Nabiullina, the Minister of Economic Development of RF, Sergei Sobyanin, the Mayor of Moscow,German Gref, the President and CEO of Sberbank of Russia, Andrey Sharonov, the Deputy Mayor on economic policy at the Moscow city government, Dmitry Kozak, Deputy Prime Minister, Xu Bo, Deputy Secretary General of the People's Government of Beijing, and other experts.

Deputy Head of PPP and Infrastructure practice at VEGAS LEX, took part in the forum as a delegate to the session "Transport problems of megacities as one of the major limitations in their development", in which the participants discussed complex issues of traffic conditions in major cities, traffic jams and congestions as a result of insufficient planning, underdevelopment of the road infrastructure and public transport.

The latest data show that the number of participants of the forum exceeded 1,000, indicating that the event was very useful and inspirational in the way to develop Russian cities due to familiarity of the Russian professional community with the latest technology and the best global practices of the urban environmental development.