This article offers the review of the urban environment components that can be seen on the photo documents of the Soviet period kept in the State archive of Sverdlovsk region. The fonds F-1 of the State archive of Sverdlovsk region contains 46546 photo documents (42772 are negatives, 3340 are positives) and 434 albums. The potential of the fonds for conducting the city environment research can be estimated as a large one. The author analyzed information about 9791 photographs presented in the archive books to evaluate the relevance of the search results for the search query concerning the evolution of urban environment process and concerning the elaboration of the classification of urban environment elements. The relevance acquired was 47%. 34% of the documents show the city areas and its improvement (buildings and monuments, streets, squares, the processes of construction and reconstruction of different spaces). The amount of photographs of the industrial objects and operation processes is also big. The documents describing the objects related to culture, education, medicine, sport, trade, recreation and other facilities create the image of safe and comfortable urban environment. In the 30th of XXth century Sverdlovsk was becoming an experimental area for the new technologies, new urban planning decisions and household samples implementation. Photo documents of this period are devoted to the topic of renovation and industrialization. Some aspects of improvement of public services and household practices are demonstrated in the documents of the 1940s and 1950s. The volume of documents of the period of the Great Patriotic War is small. The documents of the period after war get a certain political tint. In the middle of the 1960s, when the city population came closer to the first million, the process of creating photo documents became more status and scale oriented. The image of Sverdlovsk during the period from year 1937 until 1979 transformed a lot and this evolution can be seen with the help of photo documents. We can also make some conclusions about the factors of transformation which include the central policy and choosing Sverdlovsk as a platform of the socialistic experiment in building the “city of future”, the complex approach to the urban planning and of course the industrialization which played an enormous part in the city development. By the end of the 1970s the status of Sverdlovsk as the regional industrial center of Urals became undisputable.