The Article is dedicated to the analysis of alterations that occur in the structural land use in the territory of large cities and to formation of proposals on improvements of the city policy in the area of land use, infrastructure development and ecology. St. Petersburg, that is one of the largest Russian cities, is used as an example for the analysis. However, the tendencies and issues identified in the article may be considered generic for all large cities of Russia. The article is based on the analysis of the structural change of the land use in St. Petersburg during the recent decades. Historic, comparative and statistic research methods for the structural dynamic of the land use in the Russian cities and its consequences are applied in the article. The problems reviewed in the article are just fragmentary covered in the modern scientific papers, and conclusions and proposals of the authors are original by nature. It is stated in the article that several alterations in the structural use of urban land became specific during recent decades, and those alterations are caused by a number of reasons, that are primarily social-economic and economic-technological reasons by nature. Social-economic factors firstly determine alterations in the land property structure. Poly-subjective proprietary impact onto the urban land causes ambiguous consequences for urban planning activity, that increases owners initiative, on the one part, and causes problems while approving interests for urban projects implementation and territory development programs, on the other part. Practice to considerably increase the property owners and people participation in determining areas for territory transformation and to involve people in development and implementation of complex territorial project development is offered in the article. Effect of economic-technological factors is observed in significant alterations in functional urban land structure. First, it is connected with reduction of the territories that were prior used for industrial structures. Redevelopment of the territories, that were vacated off industrial structures, is already admitted successful and demanded to be a target for development of the Russian city areas. Alteration in the functional land structure requires appropriate activities in the area of urban planning solutions that are aimed to meet the requirements of environmental security for population, and, primarily, solutions connected with sanitary protection zones and land plots located in such zones. The article describes the necessity to inventory the urban industrial territories and sanitary protection zones in order to ensure environmentally secured use of the urban territories for residential and business construction.