Analysis of the Effectiveness of Urban Planning Solutions for the City of Nadym in a Half-Century Retrospective

The process of urbanization of the oil and gas production complex in the north of Western Siberia in the 1960s1980s was marked by the active introduction of scientifically based approaches designed to minimize the negative effects of the Arctic and sub-Arctic climate on residents of new cities under construction. One of the serious problems in implementing project approaches to the formation of the urban environment in the Arctic was that they were only capable of predicting the specifics of the economic, social and environmental development of the new city in the relatively short term. The main aim of this article is to analyze the effectiveness of the urban planning theory developed by the LenZNIIEP team on the case of the city of Nadym, founded in the early 1970s. The study is based on the research work of LenZNIIEP. In order to obtain subjective assessments of the development and use of the urban environment of Nadym, a series of thematic interviews were conducted with experts and residents of the city. In addition, recent scientific literature on the topic of research has been analyzed. During the study, the features of design solutions and the evolution of the development of four urban planning subsystems of Nadym were considered. The task of urban planning physics was to minimize the discomfort caused to the city’s population by the harsh landscape and climatic conditions. An important result of the development of urban ecology was the successful greening of open urban spaces in the Arctic climate. The main task of urban planning psychology was to create color schemes for buildings that are comfortable for Arctic conditions. The tasks of urban planning sociology included the adaptation of the urban environment to the demographic and socio-economic characteristics of the young Arctic city. The case of Nadym demonstrates that effective implementation of all urban planning subsystems can mitigate the effects of the harsh Arctic climate on the city residents and improve quality of their life. At the same time, due to the paradigm change in urban development of the Russian Arctic, the development of an “adaptive” approach is becoming increasingly relevant, as it was designed to identify and implement individual strategies for organizing a comfortable urban environment, taking into account the characteristics of local natural and climatic conditions.