To provide sustainable development (and not just growth) of urban areas, experts and regional authorities should jointly follow the principles of Sustainable Development (SD) that were originally proposed by the fundamental work Limits to Growth(Meadowset al., 1972) which described global, national and inter-regional strategies, plans and dynamics for urban development. As a result of SD, a new (more sustainable) type of urban strategy, ecopolis strategy, can be proposed.

We will present an example of such an urban ecopolis strategy. It was elaborated for Moscow Region city Korolev, combining architecture, planning and design, ecosystem restoration, evaluation of risks and calculation of resources required for strategy implementation. The ecopolis strategy for Korolev city (“E Korolev project”) was produced over several years by a special task force – a joint Italian and Russian team along with the city council of Korolev (Kavtaradze, Casu, 2011) – which concentrated the project around key elements of ecopolis strategy, as described in the article.