Meerovich Mark Grigorievich, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Candidate of Architecture, Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Architecture and Construction Sciences, Corresponding Member of the International Academy of Architecture, Professor at the National Research
Irkutsk State Technical University
This article was written ahead of the ISOCARP Congress.
Today, human civilization has formed two fundamentally different ways of making planning decisions. Let's conditionally call one of them administrative and managerial; the second is democratic.
Soviet vertical
In the USSR, all urban planning processes took place exclusively on the initiative and with the permission of the authorities. Urbanization itself, initiated by the Soviet industrialization of the 1930s, had an “artificially forced” nature.
During the years of Soviet power, not only very specific conditions for urban planning were formed, but also special, very specific types of thinking and activities of urban architects. Let me emphasize that they are completely different from those in the West. It was a path from top to bottom. And a characteristic feature of this path was that in the USSR all the main urban planning decisions were made without the participation of those for whom they were made.
What the planning structure would be was not decided by the architects (and even more so, not by the residents), but by the authorities. Whether the buildings of the city administration will be located in one or several centers, whether the streets of cities should be curvilinear or rectilinear, and residential quarters should be rectangular, as well as the fact that buildings should be located along the perimeter, and not with the ends of houses towards the street - all this was decided by the authorities.
The content of urban planning decisions was predetermined by a single national economic planning; centralized financing; limited material and technical supply; compulsory forms of organization of intracity life and activities; a complete ban on private entrepreneurship in the urban economy and the introduction of a total distribution system for the supply of products, things, services in its place; the absence of a real estate market, instead of which there was a state system for providing housing to the working population; lack of real self-government in the development of territories.
A huge role was played by the system of normative indicators that regulated the density of building, the balance of the territory and indicators of the cost of construction. They could not be changed by any arguments.
In the 1920s. urbanistic postulates began to take shape, which then existed for many years in the USSR unchanged:
- a Soviet city is always a settlement in production (a kind of "working-class settlement");
- the size of the population in a Soviet city is calculated in advance, compulsorily recruited, and then strictly regulated by the entry in the passport of the place of residence ("registration"), which can be changed only with the consent of the authorities;
- a settlement always has one main center, in which power buildings and main public buildings are located;
- the typology of the dwelling is determined not by the desire of people or the creative imagination of the architect, but by the standards for the cost of 1 sq. meter, indicators of material consumption, etc.; she was absolutely indifferent to a specific person with his individual needs;
- there is no social order, because the goals, objectives and content of project activities, strategies and implementation opportunities were determined and dictated by the only "customer" - the Soviet state;
- etc.
All urbanization in the USSR, starting from 1929 - from the first five-year plan, was an artificial, purposefully carried out process. The Bolsheviks considered the main task of the new spatial structure of the country to be "ensuring the economic compression of space." This was achieved through "trunk" (optimization of the transport network, increasing the speed of movement and traffic capacity) and "agglomeration" (ie, increasing the share of economically short connections in production processes and settlement).
Even without suspecting the existence of the term "agglomeration" (and it did not exist at that time), the Soviet government, in strict accordance with its principles (which will be formulated much later, in thirty years), created large urbanized territories in the basic settlement areas.
The Soviet government was confident that without urbanization it would not be able to solve the problem of the country's industrial development. As a result, Soviet urbanization was, on the one hand, a consequence of the development of the military industry, and, on the other, its condition. They drove to empty places, to newly-built cities, first of all, former peasants, but not only them, but also other very different groups of the population, turning all of them into a very peculiar socio-cultural group of "lumpen-townspeople", rapidly growing in numbers.
This process - "artificially forced accelerated urbanization", continued throughout the Soviet period, and in terms of urbanization, Russia today even overtakes many countries that are industrially developed much better than us.
In the post-perestroika period, the situation in Russian urban planning has changed dramatically. But in many respects, Russia is still following a "special" path. In particular, in the ideology of city management, Soviet postulates have survived to our time, practically unchanged - until now, the overwhelming majority of deputies and heads of municipalities are convinced that the main source of existence and development of settlements is production. Today, the urban environment of Russian settlements develops not according to the laws of implementation of planning decisions, but due to the availability of funds in the city budget, after it is “sawed off” for annual corruption repairs of roads or the purchase of cleaning equipment, which immediately breaks down, etc.
Some people call the "post-perestroika period" - the period of the late 1990s and early 2000s. - "the flowering of planning freedom." Emphasizing the fact that the dictatorship of the central government has disappeared, and national standards and regulations have become unnecessary. Outwardly, indeed, it looked like that. But at the same time, the standards of the Soviet era guaranteed the presence of large tracts of greenery in the city, filling the urban environment with the minimum necessary set of functions - parking lots, sports grounds, recreational areas, children's play areas and other facilities, without which a comfortable existence in an urban environment is impossible. The Soviet architect, relying on the standards, was professionally responsible for the quality of the urban environment, performing an important social function.
In the "post-perestroika period", while there was a struggle between the central government, which was building a vertical of subordination to itself, and the local authorities, defending their rights to manage their parts of the territory, Russian cities received: urban lands; b) total destruction of public spaces; c) the chaotic and unrestrained growth of satellite settlements, as a rule, uncomfortable and completely unsupported with service facilities; d) spontaneous sprawl of city territories, e) collapse of engineering and transport infrastructures, etc.
All this happened against the backdrop of a massive hit of architects, and even more so, customers, in the mainstream of the captivating fashion for "planning painting". The complete absence of social issues and attitudes towards solving social and cultural problems, the pursuit of external attractiveness, "visual extravagance" and "eccentricity of planning schemes" have become a characteristic feature of almost all planning work of the last decade.
Today everything is sold and everything is bought. What the city should be like now is not decided by experts, but by the corruption system, which perceives the city territory exclusively as an inexhaustible source for the enrichment of local elites, officials and their entourage. Cities are torn to shreds - territories chaotically built up by those who managed to bargain them from the mayor's office or outbid them from more successful land speculators. More and more accusations are made against the city authorities that they hinder the development and adoption of the entire set of territorial planning documents and constantly force planners to revise general plans only in order to retroactively enter into them illegally and "secretly" land allocations.
Today, nothing has been proposed in exchange for the principles of Soviet urban planning. In modern Russia, practically not a single intelligible, unambiguously interpreted thesis has been put forward that can replace them. Today, there is no urban planning concept within the framework of which post-Soviet cities could effectively exist and develop.
Today, in the Russian profession of a planner, three components coexist, rather poorly getting along with each other: a) democratic foundations legally laid down by the Town Planning Code;
b) the professional and ideological concept of the architect's mission in society, which is “Soviet” in nature, is that “professionals know better than anyone what the population needs” (and this belief, I note, today is largely quite true);
c) real mechanisms for making decisions from the outside - from outside the sphere of planning activities - in the echelons of power, as well as mechanisms of coercion, forcing the developers of territorial planning documents to visualize and implement these “alien” decisions.
The reluctance to realize and change this situation stems from the complete conviction of the local and central authorities that apart from the authorities there is no and cannot be any other "subject" for the management of settlements; in the fact that no one, except the authorities, is able to solve current problems and set long-term tasks for the development of territories. And every year in Russia the role of the authorities in matters of territorial development is increasing. Power, in exactly the same way as it was in the Soviet period, remains the main customer - the only dictator of urban strategies.
Western horizontal
The western route was and still remains radically different. Because it is based on a different legislative framework, on a different role of the law itself in the daily life of people and urban communities. This path is a manifestation of the will of the inhabitants, united in neighboring communities and territorial communities of various sizes. This path is based on a real social order and on the real opinion of specific (and not statistically abstract) residents who have their own real, not fictitious representatives - deputies who express their interests in practice.
The western path is the path in the opposite direction to the Soviet one. Let the bottom - up. This is the path in which urban processes are naturally initiated from below. Within its framework, the paradigm of the project worldview is based on the approval of an individual approach to each city. In this paradigm, population participation tends to be maximized. And the influence of local authorities is reduced to the maximum possible minimum. And the authorities don't mind.
* * *
Here begins the most acute, controversial and most unobvious part of my observations and considerations. I bring them up for your discussion.
Today the modern East (China, Arab countries, Russia, Central Asian states - fragments of the former USSR, India, etc.) is a very specific legal space for making urban planning decisions. In it, the consumer is deprived of any rights to influence planning issues. This is the place where the “eastern” vertical of power and the reluctance to give the population even the smallest parts of the functions of urban governance are intertwined with the hope of the authorities at all levels for the beneficial influence of the “western” creative principle. The authorities are sincerely confident that Western architects will come and do everything as comfortably and rationally as in the West. But they get the right to come to these countries under a certain condition - they must fulfill the wishes of the authorities. Those. subject to the complete oblivion of the "Western" legislative and social foundations and the complete denial of the democratic procedures for expressing the will of the townspeople.
A modern planner who is captured by these conditions finds himself in a peculiar situation. He is not limited by anything and is not motivated by anything, except for one thing - to do so in order to please the customer. Or a specialist-planner turns out to be completely dependent on the investor, who in the countries of the East, in turn, is completely dependent on the authorities. As a result, the position of a specialist planner is very similar to the flunkey question "what do you want".
Most of the modern "oriental" projects carried out by European and American architects do not solve any social problems. Take China, for example. Someone proposes to build 200-300 meter high skyscrapers here, without answering the question - why are they needed and ignoring the fact that the strategy of construction of high-rise residential and public buildings contradicts economic feasibility and ecological paradigm. Someone is designing a low-density isolated development of the European-American type, not paying attention to the fact that it destroys the traditional socio-organizational basis of Chinese society - the local neighborhood community (which in China is denoted by the concept of "grassroots democracy of urban residents" - an analogue of the Russian term "territorial public self-government "). Someone just "formalizes" construction of straight-line highways, not noticing, at the same time, climatic problems arising as a result of the fact that many kilometers "wind tunnels of development" initiate the emergence of storm winds, which sharply worsen the conditions of everyday life.
Planning projects that have lost the cultural meaning of place and time and are devoid of social content inevitably turn into a “montage of visual quotes”. For example, the authors of the Gaoqiao project, a new satellite city of Shanghai (arch. Ashok Bhalotra, Wouter Bolsius), propose “to build a“fort city”in the center of the recreation area, surrounded by bastions and a moat. They believe it will "resemble the ideal cities of the Renaissance." But the authors do not explain why such a "reminder" is needed to the population of modern China?
Other authors propose to turn Pujian - another satellite city of Shanghai - into an "Italian" city (arch. Audusto Cagnardi, Vittorio Gregotti). Third authors (arch. Meinhard von Gerkan, Nikolaus Goetze) propose to liken the layout of another satellite of Shanghai - the city of Luchao, into a kind of "circles of waves radiating from a drop falling into the water."
But neither the authors nor the customer (city authorities) answer the question: why should a “Dutch” or “French” city be built in a Chinese province? No one is trying to prove that the social processes of life in modern China, or in the China of tomorrow, expressed through the layout of a settlement, are like "waves from falling something into the water."
And no one sets himself the task of giving an answer to the most important question: "What should be a modern, specifically, a Chinese city?"What specific social processes taking place in Chinese society should be expressed and enshrined in architecture and urban planning? What are the specific tendencies and should they be planned to facilitate their development or, on the contrary, is it necessary to purposefully counteract them, consciously changing the course of development of urbanized territories? What environment of tomorrow should be created today in order to serve as a model for the authorities and residents of the countries of the "East"?
Outcome
Today, for countries experiencing urban growth and, at the same time, the collapse of habitat management, neither of the two existing approaches to spatial planning is equally suitable. Neither Western, based on the democratic will of the population; nor "Soviet" based on centralized administration.
The participation of urban and regional planners in the development of cities in the countries of the modern East should be based today on completely new knowledge, professional ideology, the theory of urbanization processes management and a socially-oriented philosophy of developing territorial planning documents adequate for the cities of the East.
The strategy for these cities should be based not only and not so much on keeping urban sprawl as on defining the “nature” of urbanization: for example, should cities grow upward or segregate into local mid-rise settlements; what should be the measure of "party-state coercion" to limit the growth of urbanized territories and what should be the financial and economic mechanisms for regulating the population of cities, etc.
The strategy for these cities should be based not only and not so much on the improvement of the ecology (although this is very important) or on the socio-reform ideas of transforming society (which is also relevant). It is not enough for her to rely on the theories of James Jacobs, Kevin Lynch, Ebizener Howard, Patrick Abercrombie, Norberg Schulze, Christopher Alexander, Ilya Lezhava, Alexei Gutnov, and others.
This should take into account the fact that in these countries:
- firstly, the centralized administrative-command system is not able to act as a “full-fledged” customer, since, being completely cut off from society, it does not care about the population, but dictates to designers only those decision-making strategies that are beneficial (including economically) only to herself;
- secondly, market liberalism, not limited by public control, does not lead to a spontaneous saturation of the urban environment with various functions and, therefore, to an improvement in the quality of life, but only leads to the plundering of urban areas and the enrichment of individuals (or clans) through speculation in land;
- thirdly, the population has no rights, is not geographically co-organized, not independently and easily manipulated; and besides, it is devoid of values (moral, environmental, cultural, historical, democratic, etc.); it is self-serving and its decisions do not lead to a rational management of the territory and an improvement in the quality of life.
Creation and dissemination of knowledge on the development of cities and regions is the main goal of ISOCARP.
Only in close cooperation with leading planners, universities, scientific organizations is it possible to jointly develop a new professional ideology, worldview and theory of strategic planning. Which would be adequate for the countries of the East, which are now experiencing, on the one hand, rapid urban growth, and on the other, a crisis in the territorial planning management system. The crisis of the meaning of planning activities.
Only through the formation of new knowledge, a new theory of urbanization processes management and a new socially-oriented philosophy of the development of territorial planning documents can one really help the government and other bodies of the countries of the East, interested in the true development of the habitat.
