The study of the problem of sustainable development of urban areas led to the understanding of the important role that population involvement plays in solving the issues related to forming a comfortable urban environment. It is normal practice to take into account the proposals and recommendations of citizens and organizations when making decisions in the field of territorial development. Nevertheless, the implementation of participatory governance mechanisms faces significant difficulties. This is primarily due to the lack of effective tools for analyzing the opinion of citizens and technologies for integrating urban communities into existing institutions of governance. This article discusses the ways of organizing expert polls based on the principles of “Socratic dialogue”. The idea of using social networks for testing and promoting urban development projects by analyzing social reactions to various urban initiatives is considered. The possibility of predicting public opinion about a specific solution for urban development using historical data from social networks has been investigated. An approach to the gamification of work with a social response to the urban environment state through virtual interactions with infrastructure objects is proposed. The prospects for gamification to motivate civic participation and improve the efficiency of feedback mechanisms between the city and its residents are discussed.

The article considers the actual problem of the ecology of urban areas associated with air pollution by industrial and energy enterprises. The study is aimed at substantiating the method of forming a plan for atmospheric air pollution observation using mobile laboratories. The quantitative characteristic of sites for different urban development zones is determined as a set of estimates. The air pollution index was chosen as a total sanitary and hygienic criterion for assessing pollution. The implementation of the decision-making problem using the analytic network process method is considered. Parameters of the city and environment that affect the assessment of atmospheric air quality were selected in the course of the study. A network structure of mutual influence of the studied parameters is formed. The architecture of the decision support system based on the proposed method is given. The created software makes it possible to automate the modeling of the distribution of pollutants in the atmosphere. The computational experiment is presented on the example of the Volgograd agglomeration, Russia. The proposed approach can significantly improve the organization of monitoring by mobile laboratories and reduce the cost of obtaining data on urban air pollution without increasing the number of existing observation laboratories, both stationary and mobile.

A research of approaches with the purpose of the assessment of the impact of environmental regulations on the site selection for construction is presented in this paper. The approaches of the environmental air monitoring in Russia and abroad, and particularly the collection and interpretation of data are also studied. The authors obtained data archives of the environmental air monitoring. This data is interpreted using the Russian method (maximum permissible concentration) and the main foreign one (air quality index). Discrepancies in the interpretation of the environmental air monitoring data are found. In many cases, according to the Russian method, the air quality was considered acceptable but the foreign methodology recommends to limit a long-term outdoor presence of citizens from the risk groups. The deficiencies of the Russian standards in the environmental air monitoring are found and described in the paper. Improvements to the Russian methodology are also proposed by authors.

The article analyzes the problems in obtaining the environmental information data sets necessary for decision making in the field of air quality assessment. The authors of this article describe their experience in search for data required to run the WRF and Calpuff systems to estimate the air quality in the city of Volgograd, the Russian Federation. The problems the authors encountered and other researchers may encounter are indicated. A conceptual scheme of the resource that will help to increase the speed of searching for necessary information and also inform users about the rules for use of a particular resource is suggested.

The article provides an overview of the systems for modeling the spread of pollutants, discusses their advantages and disadvantages. An approach to modeling the spread of pollutants in the atmospheric air of an urbanized area on the basis of the Calpuff software suite is proposed. The processes and sources of data on the terrain, meteorological parameters, etc., necessary for the generating concentration maps for Russian cities are described in detail. The approach consists of three main stages: modeling meteorological parameters, modeling pollution spread and visualization of the data obtained. An example of modeling of pollutants spread in the atmospheric air for Volgograd is given.