Public hearings on the general plan, which shook Moscow this summer and autumn, are coming to an end - a special city commission has already collected and processed more than 25 thousand comments from city residents. Now the document with all the corrections made should go for discussion to the Moscow City Duma, which is expected to adopt it during December. However, the expert community was ousted from the process of discussing and finalizing the general plan - on the one hand, the chief architect of the city gave the order to join this work in the spring, on the other hand, a real opportunity to express their opinion appeared only now, at the finish line. True, even this, hard-won meeting, can be considered a victory only with a very big stretch, since the new Gradcodex does not take into account the opinion of the professional message at all - there is simply no such situation in it.
The experts held a meeting on the updated general plan together with the developers of this main urban planning document of Moscow - leading employees of the Research and Development Institute of the General Plan and its head Sergei Tkachenko. True, the speeches of the authors added practically nothing to the fact that the chief architect of Moscow, Alexander Kuzmin, had already spoken about the new master plan many times. The only exception was, perhaps, a new scheme for the development of the Central Administrative District, developed by the team of "Mosproekt-2", in which the so-called. "Reorganization zones" in favor of "stabilization zones". The experts have not yet seen her in this version.
Most of all, ECOS was interested in the section of the general plan dedicated to the protected zones of heritage sites. The opinion of experts on this matter was summed up in his speech by the director of the Center for Historical and Urban Planning Research Viktor Sheredega: "The section turned out to be insignificant." Elena Solovyova, head of the workshop of NPO No. 38 of the General Planning Institute, tried to object to this, that this section reflected an attempt by the developers "to outline measures to improve the heritage protection system." For example, the territories of the protected zones were analyzed, and the Moscow Heritage Committee prepared a corresponding act “on the approval of the boundaries of cultural heritage sites”. An attempt was also made to determine the value of the buildings from the 1940s and 1950s. However, many noble undertakings, as the developers themselves admit, were thwarted by the same new Gradcodex, which, for example, includes only those that are directly related to the territories of monuments in the zones of protected natural landscapes, and does not prescribe the concept of a "landmark" at all. As a result, according to Viktor Sheredega, the general plan did not at all reflect the changes that have occurred with the capital in the last 10-15 years, while experts assess them as catastrophic - the protection zones are shrinking like shagreen leather from year to year. The promised expansion of the list of valuable panoramas of the historical center was also not included in the new master plan - experts with bitter irony suggested that their absence was compensated by the arrangement of several viewing platforms (for example, on the roof of a government house).
According to Aleksey Klimenko, the reason for the change in the ideology of the general plan lies in the fact that today the customer of its development is not the state, but the city represented by the government of Moscow."Because of this, the document becomes not analytical, but only fixing the already existing set of decisions of the capital's leadership," Klimenko said. This idea was supported by the President of the Russian Academy of Architecture and Construction Sciences Alexander Kudryavtsev: "The new document serves mainly to facilitate the implementation of investment activities." In itself, it is not that bad if the investment pressure were diverted from the historical center, as is done, say, in Paris.
Another serious problem faced by the authors of the general plan was the status of Moscow as one of the subjects of the federation - in contrast to the special status of the capital, it did not allow considering the city and the region as a single agglomeration. Forced to develop the capital only within its artificially drawn borders, which, according to experts, will inevitably be destroyed or radically altered in the coming years, the designers actually initially did not have the opportunity to adequately solve the problems of transport, preserving the belt of green zones and the prospective development of the metropolis.
In fact, this ECOS meeting was of a purely controversial nature, since approving or not approving the draft of the updated general plan now, when public hearings have already taken place, and no one needs an expert assessment by itself, at least it makes no sense. This, of course, could not but affect the mood of the audience and the nature of the discussion itself. The meeting lasted almost 4 hours, but no specific proposals were voiced. Many speakers complained about the disunity of Moscow and the region in planning and at the same time noted the futility of the attempts of the capital's mayor to create a single "Moscow kingdom." Some experts proposed to postpone the adoption of the general plan and finalize it, for example, after receiving the results of the examination at the federal level.
The most sensible, perhaps, is to recognize the ECOS proposals on the section on protected zones: firstly, to outline the boundaries of the historical core of Moscow ("historical settlement") on the general plan diagrams, and secondly, to consider all specific disputed territories that fell into the reorganization zones " by mistake”, as, for example, it happened with Pushkin Square, and give them a protective status. These decisions are planned to be sent directly to the Moscow City Duma, on which the fate of the updated general plan now depends. However, the question of whether the deputies will heed the opinion of experts, so far, alas, remains open.
