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Abstract: This article is devoted to the study of the image of the city of Sverdlovsk-Ekaterinburg in the contemporary documentary prose of the Urals. It uses the material of Aleksey Ivanov’s "Yoburg" and Anna Matveeva’s "Townspeople" short story collections to review two different concepts representing the city’s image. The following observations of the study can be highlighted as the key ones: 1) the "Yoburg" collection constructs a dynamic and contradictory image of Sverdlovsk-Ekaterinburg, whose history is a set of concepts that sequentially replace one another, whose topography is a reflection of the way the local authorities are distributed; and whose population is a socially mapped out structure; 2) the "Townspeople" offers a city image that is not tied to a specific historical period, but interconnects the names and plots that are separated by time; the city’s history, having passed through a filter of everyday urban life, appears whole and complete, its topography appears as a map of experiences, its townspeople — permanent participants in the dialogue with the city; 3) the image of Sverdlovsk-Ekaterinburg in contemporary documentary literature shares the common trait of being multilayered, which is predetermined by the narrative structure of the texts; 4) the image of Sverdlovsk-Ekaterinburg’s is based, on the one hand, on stereotypical ideas about this city ("a factory city", "an industrial giant", "a constructivism museum", etc.), while on the other one it gets freed from the adherence to stereotypes thanks to the special features of authors’ concepts; 5) documentary writers elaborate the city’s image using such artistic methods as outlining the space-time coordinates and topography, including in the text notes on architecture and details of the city’s everyday life, introducing images of local residents.