Kyiv 2025

The Kyiv municipal authorities and the Efficient Management Foundation have presented Kyiv’s development strategy until 2025. This project has involved the collaboration of the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), which has worked on similar projects for Budapest, St. Petersburg and Toronto. The public council, comprising officials, businesspeople, sociologists and creative intellectuals, was also created within this framework. On April 6 the public council examined the presented project. The strategy is planned to be discussed till the end of May, and the final version has to be worked out by Kyiv Day, celebrated on the last weekend of May.

According to the studies conducted, Kyiv is 10-12 years behind similar European capitals, such as Prague, Warsaw or Budapest. Sergei Perapiechka, BCG project manager, noted that the city is currently facing the problems that European capitals experienced 15 years ago and managed to resolve. These include the level of economic development, an insufficient transport infrastructure, poor public transport services, problems in the social security sphere (access to medical services and education, and their quality), irrational land use and spontaneous building. Keeping these problems in mind, the project developers formulated the three main components of Kyiv’s planned image in 2025.

According to them, the city should be creative and innovative. The BCG experts think that it can be done through the innovative development of two or three clusters (grouping similar companies). For example, Kyiv can become a world center for heart surgery or pharmacology. The best companies and specialists will be involved in this process, creating the image of a city with an open economy. As a result, Kyiv will become attractive for investors. In turn, investments will allow the city budget to develop. Thus, the BCG experts believe that in the future Kyiv may become a motor of economic development for the whole country. However, the project specifies one fundamental condition — greater trust in the government and transparent “rules of the game.”

Kyiv has to preserve its uniqueness on the global scale. This will make it possible to develop culture and tourism in the Ukrainian capital. For this Kyiv must maintain its historical appearance (which is clear for foreign businesspeople, though less for Ukrainian ones).

The city must also consistently improve its residents’ living standards, not just in terms of high incomes, but also in terms of comfort, development opportunities, and ecology.

The authors of the project advise developing the city strictly in compliance with the adopted plan in order to ensure the image change. It’s necessary to decentralize business activity, for example by moving the business center to the left bank from the historical part of the city. One more condition for the harmonious development of the capital is the balanced growth of Kyiv and Kyiv oblast. The development of the oblast infrastructure has to unload the central part of Kyiv. The BCG emphasizes that more efforts need to be made to develop social equality.

The plan looks perfect. However, when asked about how realistic it is, taking into account the local authorities, the central government and the high level of corruption, the authors say that the municipal authorities are responsible for its realization.

Ihor Dovban, head of the main department of economy and investments at the Kyiv City State Administration explained that, in order to avoid revising the priorities for the capital’s development every time new people come to power, the council’s management has envisaged a law on the strategic development plan. However, in his opinion, the problem lies not only in the rotation of the local authorities, but in the dependence of the local budgets on the state budget. “You know that the budget is usually approved in the spring, then the money is allocated and the local authorities have about six or seven months to use them. That is why we are now discussing the possibility of adopting the Kyiv budget for at least three years with the Ministry of Finance,” said the official.

“It’s clear that the development strategy is only one component of the big work, which we begin today,” says the plan’s initiator, the head of the Kyiv City State Administration Oleksandr Popov. “We have to decide on the law ‘On the Ukrainian capital, the city of Kyiv,’ to determine the place of Kyiv and its relations with the central government. We can see that this plan has to be changed. To make the development efficient we had to find specialists to identify the priorities. This question is very important and the discussion during the meeting of the public council has proved it.”