Review article

The article considers the problems of increasing the efficiency of reconstruction of the pre-revolutionary period apartment buildings preserving their existing architectural and planning structure and basic facades. Possibilities of increasing the consumer demand of reconstructed apartment houses taking into account the differentiated demand of specific consumer groups for non-uniform qualities of the inhabited environment in the city center are considered in the paper. The main indicative parameters of the living environment in the central districts on the «micro-environment» and «house» levels have been revealed. The differentiating requirements of dwellings` consumers dictated by the level of their material solvency and demographic characteristics of families are specified. There have been substantiated the main directions of reconstruction, specific architectural and planning solutions are listed that allow increasing the total share of the most comfortable housing (including that of the front type), as well as increasing the demand for dwellings of intra-quarter type and carrying out the re-functioning of insufficiently lighted intra quarter parts of buildings using the sparing methods at the expense of the revealed resources of buildings.