In 1781, Catherine the Great gave Yekaterinburg the status of a district town of Perm Province, and built the historical Siberian Route through the city.

Dmitry Mamin-Sibiryak very vividly described the beginning of the construction of a mining plant and a fortress: "Imagine completely deserted banks of the Iset river, covered with forest.

[37] In 1726, Wilhelm de Gennin founded an auxiliary Verkh-Isetsky plant with a working settlement 2 versts from Yekaterinburg upstream ('verkh' in Russian) the Iset River.

Colloquially called by the Russian acronym VIZ, it was a satellite town until in 1926, with a population of over 20,000 people by this time, it was incorporated into Yekaterinburg as the core of the Verkh-Isetsky district.

In 1781 Russia's empress, Catherine the Great, granted Yekaterinburg town status and nominated it as the administrative centre for the wider region within Perm Governorate.

Until 1863, Yekaterinburg remained subordinate to the head of the mining plants of the Ural ridge, the minister of finance and personally to the emperor, and enjoyed considerable freedom from the governor's power.

[40] Following the October Revolution, the family of deposed Tsar Nicholas II was sent to internal exile in Yekaterinburg where they were imprisoned in the Ipatiev House in the city.

In the early hours of the morning of 17 July, the deposed Tsar, his wife Alexandra, and their children Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and Tsarevich Alexei were murdered by the Bolsheviks at the Ipatiev House.

[45][27][43] By the 1934, following a series of administrative reforms carried by the early Soviet government, the earliest Russian settlements which predated Yekaterinburg and laid the basis of its founding, were incorporated into the city proper.

[50][43] The lookalike five-story apartment blocks that remain today in Kirovsky, Chkalovsky, and other residential areas of Sverdlovsk sprang up in the 1960s, under the direction of Nikita Khrushchev's government.

According to the Department of Sociology of the Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation, it is among the top ten cities with the highest standard of living.

Since 7 August 2017, by order of the Bank of Russia, the branches of the Siberian, Far Eastern and part of the Prevolzhsky Federal Districts have been transferred to the control of the Ural Megaregal Directorate.

A new stage in the development of production occurred during the period of industrialisation – at this time in the city, factories were built, which determined the industry specialisation of heavy engineering.

[120] The formation of Yekaterinburg as an important transportation hub is largely due to the city's favourable geographical location on a low stretch of the Ural Mountains, through which it was convenient to lay the main roads connecting the European and Eastern parts of Russia.

[121] Yekaterinburg is one of the ten Russian megacities with the largest car fleet (0.437 megacars were registered in the city in 2014), which has been intensively increasing in recent years (by 6–14% annually).

[132] Although the metro is the second most popular type of public transport, in recent years significant problems have appeared in its work: loss-making, obsolete rolling stock, and a shortage of funds for modernisation.

[138] The decrease in volume is due to the increasing role of the fixed-route taxis in the urban transport system of Yekaterinburg, as well as the high cost of travel.

However, the city bus transport network provides significant employment for the people of Yekaterinburg, including the formidable babushkas who collect passenger fares.

[138] In addition, the city operates an electric train route linking the north-western and the southern parts of Yekaterinburg, from Sem' Klyuchey to Elizavet.

[164] According to Yekaterinburg News, the city has signed a cooperative agreement with the Russian mobile operator Vimpelcom, working under the Beeline brand.

Center has its art gallery, library, museum equipped with the newest multimedia technologies that help to present the documents, video materials and archive photos.

On 18 June 2011, Yekaterinburg launched Red Line as a pedestrian tourist route for self-guided tours by residents and visitors to go to 34 landmarks in the historical section of the city.

Architects Moses Ginzburg, Jacob Kornfeld, the Vesnina brothers, Daniel Friedman, and Sigismund Dombrovsky contributed greatly to the constructivism in the city.

At that time, older buildings were restored, giving the urban area a new environment such as: the Cosmos Concert Hall, the Puppet Theater, the children's ballet theatre The Nutcracker, the Palace of Justice, the Cathedral of the Blood, and the Church of the Transfiguration.

High-tech architecture grew influential, with buildings such as the Center for Railway Transportation Management, the Summit business centre, the Aquamarine residential complex, and the retail strip at Vaynera Street being notable examples.

[182] At the beginning of the 21st century, Yekaterinburg architects turned back to the Soviet-based avant-garde, and influence future city buildings with the neoconstructivist style.

The BRIC countries met for their first official summit on 16 June 2009, in Yekaterinburg,[196] with Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Dmitry Medvedev, Manmohan Singh, and Hu Jintao, the respective leaders of Brazil, Russia, India and China, all attending.

[citation needed] In June 2013, at the 153rd General Assembly of the Bureau of International Expositions held in Paris, representatives from Yekaterinburg presented the city's bid to host the Expo 2020.

Russian President Vladimir Putin confirmed during a televised statement in English to earmark the required funds to build an exhibition complex large enough to receive the estimated 30 million visitors from more than 150 countries.

Yekaterinburg's concept for the bid exhibition relates to the technologies to make people happy by changing the world with innovation and quality of life.