The Service Sector as a Target of Urban Planning

Entertainment, recreational, and consumer facilities, like such indices as job availability and housing conditions, are a component of the concept "comfort of the urban environment" [1]. The findings of the nationwide study "The Present State and Basic Trends of Development of the Lifestyle of Soviet People" tell us that the population in general gives quite a high rating to the activity of public amenities [2]. But this and other studies also show that there still exist disproportionalities between the growth pattern of such needs and the resources for satisfying them. This situation, in our view, has three objective causes. First, the steady territorial expansion of cities has resulted in more difficult access to the service agglomerations which developed historically in city centers. To be sure, improvements in transportation facilities to some extent compensate for this inadequacy, but the problem has not been completely resolved, and indeed new problems have arisen, such as the increasing costs of th...