ECOS is one of the last public institutions for the protection of heritage that have survived in Russian cities: it has been working in the system of the city planning apparatus of Moscow, with varying success, for more than twenty years. ECOS was very popular in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but in the era of the investment and construction boom of the 2000s, many became uncomfortable. They did not abolish it, but they actually removed it from work: out of hundreds of projects that annually came to the Moskomarkhitektura in recent years, only a few got to the council's consideration. In addition, now it turns out in hindsight that many of the ECOS approvals, which developers love to flaunt when implementing controversial projects, are fictitious: for example, the project of the scandalous hotel Kozikhinsky Pereulok, revised at the last Public Council, has the signatures of experts, although in fact it was not considered by them.
The council consists of architects, public figures, journalists who, in their free time, are engaged in assessing and adjusting urban planning policy in the historical center. The opinion of experts, as the name implies, is purely advisory in nature, but, nevertheless, in a professional environment, it has considerable weight. But the legal status of the council is not spelled out very clearly: at the moment its existence is determined by only one document - the decree of the Moscow Government from 2004, which mentions the possibility of considering a number of projects either at ECOS or at the Public Council under the mayor. The new City Code does not say anything about ECOS, and experts fear that Sergei Sobyanin, not being a Muscovite, does not even know about their existence.
ECOS members are well aware that a change of power by itself is unlikely to restore trust in the council. Its position is further complicated by the fact that ECOS's relations with the chief architect of Moscow, Alexander Kuzmin, who is the main “addressee” of the experts' work, cannot be called simple. In particular, it is enough to recall that this year Kuzmin was very dissatisfied with the criticism expressed by experts against the updated general plan of Moscow, and the experts, in turn, were hurt that their opinion was simply ignored when adopting this document.
And, nevertheless, the members of the council do not want to leave the subordination of the Moskomarkhitektura and set off, as ECOS chairman Alexander Kudryavtsev put it, on an independent voyage - on the contrary, they hope to resume a constructive dialogue with both the architecture committee and the heritage committee. "ECOS does not want to die a noble death," Kudryavtsev said. That is why the council prepared an appeal to the mayor and the Moscow government - this is a kind of “declaration of one's own value and unconditional rights to such activities,” as Natalya Dushkina formulated the main pathos of the letter. According to Alexander Kudryavtsev, it is important to regulate relations between ECOS and the authorities just now, before the liberalism inherent in any new leader has dried up.
The council considers its most valuable and useful asset to be methodological developments on the most important urban planning issues - transport, ecology, heritage protection, etc. For a long time, ECOS's work focused on the preservation of specific objects - many of them were saved, on others - to declare its position, which was subsequently recognized as fair (for example, on Pushkin Square or Provision Warehouses). However, today, the council seems to be more effective in working within the framework of major urban planning problems, such as a unified concept for the protection of monuments and amendments to the law on cultural heritage, ideology and strategy of the general plan, and so on. Moreover, the protection of specific monuments was undertaken by the public movement "Arhnadzor". However, the council does not have complete unanimity with the latter: Arkhnadzor is uncompromising in its desire to freeze any actions near monuments, while ECOS, according to Yuri Platonov, is trying to answer the question of how to regulate construction, and not prohibit it.
According to Natalia Dushkina, in order to restore its authority in the eyes of both the professional community and the general public, the council needs to take the right place in the chain of making urban planning decisions, consider projects before the architectural council, initiate project activities, and “do not lag behind, stating a mistake and trying to neutralize it. The members of ECOS themselves agree with this and are ready to fight for the return of the practice in which all significant projects are evaluated by the expert and professional community before being considered by the Public and Architectural Councils.
