Comparison of Environmental Comfort in Rural and Urban Areas

The work assesses the comfort of urban and rural environment, which remains unstudied due to the lack of available research methods. Adapted methods of assessing the comfort of urban environment are used to analyze their applicability to rural areas. Due to the lack of research on the quality of rural environment, it is necessary to create research methods that allow for an objective assessment of the quality and comfort of rural areas using criteria that take into account their main characteristics. Functional zoning of the territory of settlements is a fundamental tool of urban planning that determines the spatial organization of the community's life. Its essence lies in the differentiation of urban or rural territory into zones with predominantly homogeneous land use and dominant activities. The analysis of functional zoning allowed us to identify the main functional zones within the study areas and calculate their areas. The assessment of the criteria for visualizing residential development in the study areas revealed that the quality of the visual environment in both areas meets the II category (acceptable). This means that the concentration of harmful visual fields does not exceed the concentration of comfortable ones. The calculation of the environment quality index revealed that the quality of the environment in the studied areas is generally at the same level, but there are significant differences in the criteria for assessing the quality of the environment. It is proposed to use adapted authorial methods to assess the comfort of rural areas: a method of calculating the quality index of the environment in rural settlements and private urban areas located far from infrastructure facilities, which is based on the methodology for calculating the quality index of urban environment approved by the Government Order; and a method for calculating the quality coefficient of the visual environment. This is done by calculating the ratio of the length of the route with harmful visual fields to the total length of the route being studied.