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Akademgorodok (Upper Zone)

Reference area: Upper Zone of Akademgorodok, Novosibirsk — the original 1960s research-town core around Morskoy Prospekt, Ilyicha, Uchyonykh and Tereshkovoy streets. Data snapshot: 2026-05-23.

What this preset models

Not the denser Mikrorayon Shch nearby, and not the city itself: this is the original Upper Zone of Akademgorodok. Mid-rise Soviet apartment buildings sit widely spaced inside a continuous pine grid, with research institutes, the House of Scientists and Novosibirsk State University around the corner. Streets are very quiet, there is no metro, and groceries, cafes and culture are present but never "on every corner".

Measurements

  • Validation point: House of Scientists SB RAS, Morskoy Prospekt 23, Upper Zone (54.8362, 83.1027).
  • OSM/Overpass within 800 m: 20 cafes (7 coffee-focused), 7 restaurants, 10 fast-food, 10 pharmacies, 13 convenience shops, 1 supermarket, 5 public transport stops. Metro stations: 0 (Novosibirsk metro ends ~25 km north).
  • OSM/Overpass within 800 m: 8 cultural venues — House of Scientists theatre/exhibition hall, M.A. Lavrentiev Library, "ДК Академия" cinema, Museum of History and Culture of Siberian Peoples, community spaces.
  • OSM/Overpass within 500 m: about 33.9 km of explicitly mapped pedestrian infrastructure, about 9.8 km of 3-7 floor residential building perimeter, and 0 m of motorway/trunk/primary.
  • OSM/Overpass within 500 m: 49 forest/wood polygons (the Upper Zone street grid is overlaid on continuous pine taiga); 0 water features (the Ob Sea is ~1.5 km south, the Zyryanka stream nearby but outside the radius).
  • Open Topo Data SRTM30m, 5x5 grid within roughly 300 m of the validation point: 16 m elevation range — a gentle plateau with small undulations, less flat than central SPb but flat compared to Yerevan (median 51 m, p95 146 m).

On the feeling of "spaciousness"

What residents call "разряженность" — the sense of unprogrammed, unbuilt space simply being there — is real, but our current criteria do not measure it directly (building footprint coverage and open-green ratio would). This preset approximates it through the combination: high forest weight, moderate park, low daily-POI targets and weights (we do not expect a cafe on every corner), marketplace = 0, subway = 0, and a modest courtyard weight so the score does not collapse onto dense Soviet blocks elsewhere.

Weight decisions

  • forest is the defining signal: weight 1.0, target 5 minutes. The validation point is inside the grove.
  • walkability is the strictest possible: zero motorway/trunk/primary within 500 m, so target 500 m holds without losing the area.
  • pedestrian_infra is high: 33.9 km in 500 m is on par with central SPb.
  • culture is high but not maximal: Akademgorodok is an academic-town anchor, not a theatre district.
  • subway is zeroed: Akademgorodok has no metro and the nearest line is ~25 km away. Anything > 0 would just penalize every cell here.
  • marketplace is zeroed: there is no bazaar tradition.
  • bus_stop is the only transit signal — weight 1.0, target 8 minutes.
  • courtyard weight is moderate (0.65): mid-rise fabric exists but is sparser than in SPb; we do not want to push the score toward continuous-front Soviet quarters in other cities.
  • industry_proximity stays high: the user moved here partly to be far from industry, even if OSM mis-tags the Institute of Hydrodynamics as industrial.
  • flatness weight is high (0.85): Akademgorodok terrain is a gentle plateau, and applying this preset to Yerevan or Tbilisi should not push the user onto a steep hillside that would feel alien.
  • Outage and PM2.5 criteria are left at model defaults: Akademgorodok does not define them more sharply than the typical preference, and these data layers are currently Yerevan-only.

Sources

Rationale file: content/presets/nsk-akademgorodok/en.md