Alexander Lozhkin. Essays on the urban environment
Part 1. In search of the quality of the urban environment
These essays were written based on the materials of the lecture course "Modern concepts of the formation of the architectural environment", which I read to the 4th year students of the Department of Design of the Architectural Environment of the NSAA and the 5th year students of the Department of Architecture of the PSKhA, as well as, in a greatly abbreviated form, to professional architects, urban planners, economists for the master -classes and seminars in Yekaterinburg, Perm, Novosibirsk, Tyumen, at Baikal and twice in Nizhny Novgorod. Naturally, in a fairly short course, it is impossible to tell in any detail about the whole variety of approaches to the design of the habitat that exist in the world. Such a task was not set. The task, by and large, was to break the "matrix of stereotypes", which for many decades has been consistently laid by the domestic system of architectural and urban planning education in the heads of those who are now engaged in, and will be engaged in the development of our cities in the near future. Encourage listeners to independent research, to search for alternatives to those obviously dead-end solutions that prevail today in urban planning practice.
These essays, however, will not be a synopsis of the lectures I have read. Rather, the lecture course will set the stage for reasoning about why Russian cities cannot be made a model of a high-quality architectural environment and what ways exist to break the deadlock. But today, starting to write these "Sketches," I myself do not yet know what this reasoning will turn out to be. I hope that we will be able to make them popular in form, but deep in content. I also hope for a feedback from readers in LJ (https://alexander-loz.livejournal.com) and on Facebook (
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There are several critical issues that domestic urban planners stubbornly ignore and answers to them are not given. Obviously, there is a clear contradiction between their desire to create a high-quality architectural environment in their projects and the results that we have as a result of the implementation of their urban planning projects for residential neighborhoods and city centers. The quality of the resulting urban environment turns out to be prohibitively low, incomparable with the quality of the environment in the centers of historical cities.
Europe is by far the leader in the number of tourists coming to it from other parts of the world. This is the only region in the world to which people go not because of natural attractions, but in order to plunge into the urban environment. Even the iconic modernist capitals, which were immediately built with a pretense to become monuments of urban art - Chandigarh and Brasilia - did not become places of mass pilgrimage for tourists, despite the fact that these artificially created cities turned out to be not very convenient for the life of the local population. If we talk about the domestic version of modernist urban planning, which was replicated many times in microdistrict buildings in all Soviet cities, then no one, except extreme bloggers, would think to go to these areas as tourists, and people live in them most often only from for the lack of a worthy alternative. And even when multimillion-dollar funds are invested in the improvement of such areas, which happens infrequently, they do not receive a level of comfort, even if only slightly comparable to the quality of the environment of old European cities.
Housing in such areas is still in demand, but only because the townspeople do not have much choice. As soon as it arises, and the economy of micro-districts begins to be considered not only from the direct costs of building square meters, but also taking into account the costs incurred by the community as a whole, the costs of operating buildings, the maintenance of huge territories, these areas cease to be successful. And then, as foreign practice shows, these areas quickly turn into marginal ghettos, or even empty out altogether.
The fact that modern urban planners cannot create an environment quality that is not much closer to that of old cities may seem surprising given that, with rare exceptions, no one specifically designed the historical environment. It developed naturally, spontaneously. Perhaps a high-quality urban environment emerges from spontaneity? Maybe there is no need to try to design or regulate the development at all and the required quality will arise by itself? Well, let's try now to compare the naturally formed areas in Russia and in Europe. Yes, in Russian cities there are also territories that were built up spontaneously - the so-called "cheeky". Can they be considered a model of comfort? Hardly. Although, as in the case of the centers of old European cities, this is a naturally formed architectural environment.
The answer to the question of why old cities are comfortable lies on the surface. The model of a traditional European city has evolved over centuries and sometimes even millennia through a natural selection of architectural and urban planning solutions that are convenient for life. And, for five centuries, until the beginning of the 19th century, European cities almost did not change their borders, sizes, and typology of buildings. In Russia, where most of the cities appeared relatively recently, such a model of its own did not have time to develop. "Nakhalovki" did not go through the repeated cycle of replacing some buildings with others, but in the preserved historical centers of cities we see an urban environment similar to the European one, which has arisen as a result of evolution. Old cities are comfortable because their environment has been forming for a long time, discarding everything unnecessary, inconvenient, and dangerous. The existing natural limitations associated with the lack of transport, engineering capabilities to build tall buildings forced the city to be built up compactly and extremely densely. A tradition arose, and following it, with its constant modernization, was a guarantee of sustainable development of cities in the XIII-XVIII centuries.
Why did architects rush to look for new urban planning concepts in the 19th and 20th centuries? What has suddenly ceased to satisfy people in the historic city? Why are cities built according to new recipes uncomfortable, and is it possible, in principle, to artificially create a comfortable urban environment by means of architecture? And if so, how? About this - in the next essays of our series.
