Kobylynskyy V. Assessment of ecological and economic development of urban areas

The dissertation is devoted to substantiation and deepening of theoretical and methodological provisions and development of scientific and practical recommendations for improving the assessment of ecological and economic development of urban areas. Over the past decades, urbanization processes have become one of the main factors in the socio-economic development of regions and states. Ukraine, like other countries of the European Union, belongs to the highly urbanized territories and this indicator tends to grow every year. Therefore, for most urban areas, an important task is to create environmentally safe living conditions for citizens and society stopping the negative impact of human activities on the environment, its protection and proper restoration. Further deterioration of the natural environment of cities, recession of the general level of the economy, deterioration of lifestyle and living conditions, reducing the security of the population necessitate the search for new approaches to defining the essence of the concept of urbanization, to rethinking the methods of urban areas management with the use of scientifically sound mechanisms for assessing environmental and economic development. In the first chapter "Theoretical and methodological principles of the urban areas study" methodological approaches to the formulation and classification of the urban area concept are developed. This process is characterized by the growing role of cities in the development of society, which directly and indirectly affects the environment, the country's development, socio-economic relations and people's way of life as well as the growth of state competitiveness. It is pointed out that urban areas are endowed with the peculiarity of rapid response to external and internal challenges, which in essence are the platforms for the development of acceleration of environmental and economic development and reform.