In recent years, Russia has been going through a boom of church building. In 2009, the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) had 29,263 parishes and by 2019 this figure had risen to 38,649. In the last decade, the growth in the number of Orthodox religious organizations and places of worship has by far exceeded that of other assets of social infrastructure. While the number of churches is growing, however, the number of schools, kindergartens and hospitals is steadily falling. Unlike other elements of social infrastructure, church building is funded not from the state budget but is financed by donors, sponsors and by the ROC itself, with some of the funds coming from payments for religious rites (baptism, weddings etc). This article analyzes the historical significance and socio-economic impact of church building by focusing on the case of the Cathedral of Saint Martyr Catherine in Ekaterinburg. The right choice of the construction site for the cathedral - the choice that would be agreeable to the metropolitan bishop, municipal government, businesses and sponsors, local community and opinion leaders - will ensure not only that the project will be duly completed but also underline the fact that local communities are able to establish consensus and recognize each other’s interests in local decision-making. One of the possible locations considered for building St.Catherine’s Cathedral in Ekaterinburg was a former industrial site in the centre of the city. Eventually, it was chosen as the most suitable place for this large-scale project. Redevelopment of an underused or abandoned industrial site, resulting in the improvement in the quality of urban environment, can be seen as an effective instrument of project realization, contributing to the building’s social and economic significance.

As Russian universities switched to distance education in March 2020 to prevent CO-VID-19 from spreading, self-paying students started questioning the fairness of tuition fees during the pandemic. They filed petitions, emphasizing that distance learning could not be equated to traditional classroom-based learning, that educational services were not delivered to the full extent, and that educational quality had decreased. On those grounds, students required cutting tuition fees down to the size of those in part-time or extramural education. To understand whether universities can afford making this step, we undertake to measure the price that they have paid for the transition to distance learning.

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Improving the comfort of the urban environment is a key goal of its development. Redevelopment can be used as a way to achieve it. The authors studied the historical perspective of the creation of the Ural cities, as well as the experience of implementing redevelopment projects of industrial areas in the city of Yekaterinburg. It was proven that the largest share of such projects was implemented through the complete demolition of Soviet-era buildings that had no architectural and historical value. The authors used general scientific research methods, such as analysis and synthesis, comparison and generalization, as well as methods of induction and deduction.

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