A special economic zone is a special territory where part of taxes and customs duties have been reduced for the sake of developing some important industry for the state. Now in Russia there are 15 special economic zones, four of them are technology and innovation zones. There are also tourist and industrial ones, probably port ones will appear soon. Technological innovation zones look like a "scientific" elite and their comparison with Soviet science cities seems quite legitimate. Although it is possible that a comparison with the famous American "Silicon Valley" would be more productive.
So, four new scientific towns are planned in Russia, where taxes will be reduced in order to develop science and introduce it into production. Utilities and the first buildings are being built there at the expense of the state. Then the resident investors will build, but in accordance with the master plan. In return, you get comfortable conditions and tax benefits. Three such towns were founded in the European part - in Zelenograd, Dubna and St. Petersburg. And there is only one in Siberia - in Tomsk.
The choice of Tomsk is more than justified. This city is famous for two things - lacy wooden architecture and scientific discoveries. Recently, for example, Tomsk scientists have invented a new method for restoring damaged brain tissue. There are 8 universities in the city and Akademgorodok, which belongs to the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. It is located within the city limits, but on the map it looks like a military base - because it is surrounded on all sides by a forest and is connected to the city by a single road. Outwardly, Akademgorodok looks like a typical Brezhnev quarter - it consists of banal five-story buildings of gray silicate bricks, diluted with spots of wild cedar forest.
The new Tomsk science city will be located next to the existing Akademgorodok, to the southeast of it, and will occupy part of the reserve territories of the Siberian RAS (192 hectares have been allocated for it). The closest neighbors are summer cottages, which are actively developing this wooded part of the city, as well as forests protected by ecologists and the meandering Ushayka River, which flows into the Tom. Therefore, the area, although it is listed as urban, looks like quite a summer cottage and bucolic. And besides, the academic one - the new scientific town is being built next to the old one and looks like its direct continuation.
The master plan, developed by the architectural company of Boris Levyant, diligently uses all the advantages of the area, including protected forests, three large fragments of which will be part of the new scientific town. As well as difficult terrain with a drop of about 60 m - following the unevenness of the landscape, the architects planned five types of natural zones, including an alpine village on one of the “natural” branches of the town.
Frankly speaking, it is even somehow strange to call it a city - this new formation looks so picturesque in the project of architects ABD. Unlike Akademgorodok, which is surrounded on three sides by roads like walls, the territory of the special economic zone, on the contrary, is strung on its main route, like on an axis. This main road, under which the main underground communications will pass, has been transformed from above into a boulevard planted with trees and with a wide green strip dividing the roads in the middle into left and right lanes. Sections of the main working buildings are "molded" around the main road - they will be developed by SEZ residents (more than 90 applications have already been submitted). It is conceived that the working buildings will be of two types: only office (for programmers and other IT workers) and scientific and technical, for pilot production.
In the eastern part, the main road forks into two, echoing the contours of the site in order to uniformly fill the entire territory. Near the crossroads and in two other places, the architects have conceived "public service" zones, which include everything that makes the life of working people comfortable: cafes, shops, gyms, fitness, saunas, etc. parts of the working area were not far from them. At the same time, each community center adjoins some of the natural areas - so that after playing sports, you can walk in nature.
In addition to the main one, there is also a second, additional axis - a road leading to the residential area and uniting residential buildings along it. Both axes bend picturesquely, following equally the relief and the curvature of the complex contours of the site - at the same time maintaining the image of unobtrusive natural picturesqueness.
Housing should be discussed separately. The fact is that according to the law on special economic zones, housing cannot be built in them. However, the people who will work there need to live somewhere. The state customer proposed not to design housing at all, referring to the fact that employees can travel to work from Tomsk. Nevertheless, Boris Levyant managed to convince the customer that living next to work for IT workers, many of whom are likely to be invited specialists, is more convenient. And the houses were designed as apart-hotels for temporary residence; there are 2 types of them - cottages and 5-storey buildings.
Boris Levyant defines the genre of the resulting project as a "high-tech park" - by analogy with a business park, in the design and construction of which ABD architects already have considerable experience (the business park in Krylatskoye has already been completed, the business park "Western Gate" at the intersection of Mozhaisky highway and MKAD are now under construction). This experience in Tomsk has acquired a new, larger scale and, as a result, a new quality that could be designated as “urban planning”.
It is easy to see that expanding the scope of the typology of a business park known to them, ABD architects have designed a kind of ideal city for a special economic zone. Which is best consistent with the concept of a garden city that emerged in the 19th century and haunts the minds of city planners throughout the subsequent time. Nature in this project is domesticated, but rather in English than in French, while preserving and even emphasizing its naturalness. It is admitted into the settlement, sometimes preserving it in the form of a local forest, then turning it into an alpine village and thus providing the inhabitants with a variety of impressions. And also - a feeling of spaciousness and a certain degree of freedom. The garden city borders on the English park and then smoothly turns into the Siberian forest.
I would like to note several features of this project. Firstly, it is definitely town-planning - here from scratch, if not a “city within a city,” then a new microdistrict with its own laws and its own customs is being laid. Secondly, ABD architects design it based on their extensive experience in building offices and business parks. They provided their architectural concept with a detailed economic application, with a financial model and analysis of the project's profitability. With a huge number of numbers and tables. Together, this is called the concept of territory development - and goes far beyond purely architectural work. “This is a rather economic and political project,” says Boris Levyant. It turns out that the experience of the architectural company ABD, which is engaged in the construction of offices a lot and effectively, being projected onto a state project, has passed into a new quality. The constant interest of architects in related areas allowed them to approach the urban planning task in a diversified manner, and the work has outgrown the purely architectural framework. In the case of such a specific economic urban planning of a special economic zone, this must be recognized as a blessing. In other words, if we really want large foreign investors from knowledge-intensive spheres to settle in Tomsk, then the choice of ABD architects as a designer must be considered successful.
