Moscow and region
According to the Izvestia newspaper, the Russian government has developed a bill obliging Moscow and the region to approve a single territorial planning scheme for the two regions by December 31, 2014. The draft amendments to the City Code was developed on behalf of Vladimir Putin after the meeting on the expansion of Moscow on August 14, 2012, and if this document is now adopted, the Moscow and Moscow Region authorities will have to bring all land development plans to a common denominator and neutralize conflict situations related to housing construction. ecology, transport and other areas. According to Izvestia sources in the governments of both regions, a unified territorial planning scheme means, for example, that Moscow will not be able to move harmful production out of the city, and the region will not be able to continue spontaneous housing development without creating infrastructure and places of employment. In addition, both subjects will have to radically revise the existing urban planning documents. And if Moscow in any case hoped to make a new General Plan by 2014, then the regional territorial planning scheme, adopted in 2007, was calculated until 2020.
In the meantime, the Moscow Region government is developing new regional urban planning standards. The current regulations were developed for a long time, starting in 2010, by the team of the former governor of the region, Gromov, and were adopted on May 1, 2012, 10 days before his official departure from office. "… we intend to significantly improve the comfort of the living environment by increasing the number of infrastructure facilities, recreation and road capacity," the Interfax news agency quotes the deputy chairman of the regional government, Roman Filimonov. The key indicators of the new norms should be the density of buildings and the number of people living in the territory, which, according to the developers, will avoid a shortage of social infrastructure facilities.
The new norms of urban planning immediately provoked emotional discussion, primarily because they plan to abolish the restrictions on the number of storeys existing in the current document. The interlocutors of the Izvestia newspaper suppose that the lifting of restrictions will cause the development of the Moscow region either with "skyscrapers", or (more likely) with multi-storey buildings of panel series. This should be recognized as probable, since it is known that the removal of any restrictions is usually required to satisfy someone's interests.
On the Facebook page of Project Russia magazine, a heated discussion of the new norms unfolded under the heading “Moscow Region under Threat!”, But it quickly came to the conclusion that the new norms are not as simple as it might seem at first glance. “The norms clearly state that the height of buildings will be based on the existing development. And this is done just in order to avoid discordant areas”- writes Ksenia Bolshakova. Dmitry Narinsky, one of the developers of the document, quotes its text: "when determining the maximum number of storeys (height) of the planned development, it is recommended to install it not higher than the maximum available in the adjacent territory (in neighboring residential areas)."
Thus, the decision will be made by the local authorities “based on the characteristics of the settlement and the existing development” and will be formalized as part of the LZZ (Land Use and Development Rules). This is required by the City Code: the standards should not determine the number of storeys, but the PZZ should, and in this sense, the new standards correct the mistake made in the old ones. In addition, the new norms introduce two new concepts: "provision of residential buildings with territory" and "provision of the population with territory" - the combination of which is designed to prevent dissonances, in particular, the construction of nine-story buildings in villages, explains Vasily Balandin, an employee of the Volokolamsk regional administration.
Further, Dmitry Narinsky defines the main task of the new norms as follows: “We are carefully feeling for solid ground and are trying to get everyone out of the swamp of the current edition of the standards, which can only be applied with the personal participation of its authors, who will interpret their application along the way. The main task is to create clear understandable rules that can be applied without the participation of authors. The full text of the new urban planning standards can be downloaded from the regional government website or directly from this link.
Meanwhile, the discussion of new standards, having begun emotionally, immediately went beyond the boundaries of tactful and rational. Pro Rus began its publication with a message that nine-story houses would be built in the villages, which was certainly provocative. And Dmitry Narinsky ended the discussion in a completely unpleasant way, calling the magazine a foreign agent.
Possible future of satellite cities The Moscow region and various aspects of its development have become the focus of attention in a number of other publications. So, the head of the Moscow Region government Andrei Sharov last week invited the management of the Singapore company for the creation and management of industrial and technoparks Jurong to participate in the development of master plans for the development of the cities near Moscow - Zhukovsky and Dolgoprudny - and give their recommendations for the further development of these urban agglomerations … Vedomosti, in turn, reports that a new city for 60 thousand people may arise next to the Zhukovsky science city. By the end of October, the general plan of the Zhukovsky urban district will be presented at a meeting of the regional government.
Zelenograd has a special site dedicated to improvement and development. The goal of the project "New Ways of Development of Zelenograd" is to identify new directions for the development of the Zelenograd Administrative District using crowdsourcing technology - bringing together a large number of specialists from different professional fields to work together on solving specific problems.
Facebook is also discussing the news that the "Development of a draft strategy for the socio-economic development of the Moscow region until 2030" has begun. True, the experts still have more questions than answers. In particular, it is not clear why all the development is carried out by St. Petersburg organizations. Or why it took only 3 months to create such a large-scale strategy (at a cost of 47 million rubles!). “On the other hand, they do not need a real strategy and are not going to implement it. They'll just do it for show (well, and saw off something, as usual),”the architect Yaroslav Kovalchuk draws a disappointing conclusion.
Civil Initiatives
The website of the Association of Planners Rupanet has published a report on the recent discussion with the self-explanatory title "Do it yourself … megalopolis!", Which took place within the framework of the science festival at Moscow Institute of Architecture. An open discussion on civic initiatives and their role in changing urban space took place on October 12 and brought together over 70 participants. “Yes, civic initiatives can really change our cities. Moreover, in the conditions of prosperity of "shadow town planning" they are the only tool for this "- the organizers write in the final report. The concept of "shadow urban planning" looks very curious: "the prevailing, traditional model of city development, in which any changes, whether it is a cut of trees, perhaps really old ones, or the expansion of" outbound "highways, perhaps necessary, for citizens actually turns out to be unpleasant surprise."
On October 13, the Artplay hosted a presentation of the project “Lively city. Basmanny”, the first stage of the festival, which, according to the plan of the organizers, should be extended to other districts of Moscow. The essence of the festival is to unite young artists and architects in the transformation of urban space. Now, within the framework of the festival, a competition has been opened for projects of small architectural forms for the Basmanny District (we are talking about playgrounds, benches, lampposts and other objects of the urban environment). Also shown is one project already proposed for the district by the architects of the TOPOTEK1 bureau - the painting of the walls of the eerie and gloomy tunnel leading from the Kursk railway station to Kazakov Street. Nice idea, however, in the picture the tunnel still looks gloomy.
Experts
The magazine of ideas and solutions for effective city management "City Manager" has opened access to the archive of the September issue on its website. Among the most interesting publications, we note the article "The Association of the Restless", dedicated to low-cost and effective solutions that can make life in cities that are not regional centers comfortable and interesting.
Efim Freidin in his blog on Facebook published a link to the author's abstract of the doctoral dissertation of Konstantin Aksenov "Transformation of the socio-geographical space of a metropolis in post-Soviet Russia." Under the metropolis, the author of the study understands the “main city”, analyzing the structure of two global cities in Russia - Moscow and St. Petersburg - that is, cities specializing in developing solutions that are significant for the whole world or significant parts of it.
In conclusion of the review, we would like to mention that the third issue for 2012 of the journal Otechestvennye zapiski became available in electronic form. The theme of the issue was formulated as "Urban organism", and famous Russian urbanists, in particular, Vladimir Paperny, Elena Trubina and Vyacheslav Glazychev, who died in June 2012, took part in its preparation. Also, the authors of the issue were the teachers of the Higher School of Urbanism of the National Research University Higher School of Economics Elena Shomina and the Dean of the Higher School of Economics Alexander Vysokovsky. “This is a rare occurrence in our country when we published a magazine on this topic for a general, popular scientific, and not a professional user,” Vysokovsky himself notes in the preface to the new issue.
Western experience
The UrbanUrban portal tells about one of the largest industrial architecture renovation projects implemented in recent years. This is the Westergasfabriek in Amsterdam, whose article about its rebirth is called: "From a gas factory to a cultural park." The portal conducts a comprehensive analysis of the project, already recognized as an exemplary one, talking about its financing, applied management models and even ways of promoting it among the population. And in the blog of Vladimir Krasnoslobodtsev, a post was published with an extensive story about the implemented scenarios for the improvement and reconstruction of a number of Georgian cities. Leaving aside political and economic issues, the author focused on the urban development aspect of Georgia's development over the past 8 years.
Harvard Business Review Russia discusses possible ways to tackle the transport issue using the example of the Great Four - London, Singapore, New York and Tokyo - and analyzes Moscow's perspectives in the context of these examples. Alas, the conclusions of the publication are not very comforting. “The plans of Moscow city planners include shopping centers at almost all metro stations. This significantly increases the load on them. Blood clots in the circulatory system of the city are destructive, especially considering that the situation with parking lots and access roads is still unimportant. " And further: “The recipe for an ideal road infrastructure has long been known: a network of low-traffic roads and a web of highways above it. In many megacities of the world, a system of highways is developed. They also exist in Moscow: for example, the Suschevsky Val de jure is part of the high-speed third ring. But highways in New York or Tokyo are located above the network of ordinary roads, and in Moscow most often instead of it."
Business insider analyzes data published in the latest edition of the UN-Habitat State of the World's Cities Report 2012-13. And it demonstrates that, according to forecasts for thirty years (1990-2025), Russia will be the leader in the rate of population decline in cities. During this time, the population of St. Petersburg (!) Will decrease by 8.66%, Perm by 9.67%, Nizhny Novgorod by 11.76%. If we convert the percentages into absolute figures, then in 35 years about 400 thousand people will leave St. Petersburg, 100 thousand from Perm, and 170 from Nizhny Novgorod. The list of decreasing also includes several cities of Ukraine, South Korea, Tbilisi and Budapest; from the European cities the Italian ones got there: Rome, Milan and Turin. There is also a list of city growth, although a convention is found in the counting system - mainly large cities appear in the decreasing list, cities with a starting population of no more than a million appear in the growth list. But anyway, this is a very exciting reading.
