On December 4th and 5th, the II Moscow Urban Forum on the theme "Megapolis on a Human Scale" was held in the Manege. One of the central issues of the first day was the strategic master plan for Moscow within the renewed borders.
What should be the new master plan for the capital, what tasks it should solve and what will give the city in practice - this was discussed during the session “Master Plan - New Spatial Policy”. The discussion aroused the most active interest from the participants of the urban forum - there was nowhere in the hall, not only to sit down, but even to get up. The session moderator Yuri Grigoryan began with the fact that just a year after the approval of the current master plan, the need for its correction and updating was ripe. Today, a technical assignment is being prepared for the development of a strategic master plan, which will affect all aspects of the development of a metropolis, including economic ones.
Deputy Mayor of Moscow Marat Khusnullin said that the revision of the general plan of Moscow is primarily associated with a change in its borders. The international competition for the development of a concept for the development of the Moscow agglomeration brought a lot of fresh and useful solutions that should also be taken into account when planning the Russian capital. There are other reasons, such as the transport problem or the monocentricity of the city, when 40% of jobs are concentrated in the center of Moscow, while only 7-8% of the population live there.
The new master plan, according to Khusnullin, will comprehensively solve the city's problems. Polycentric development will become one of the planning principles. Activity centers will appear in both old and new city boundaries. One of these centers should be Kommunarka, where it is planned to build an administrative and business center capable of providing up to 200 thousand jobs.
As for the historical part of the city, today it is understood that construction there on the same scale is no longer possible. The historic city, given the limited capacity of the transport infrastructure, is over-packed. At the same time, the main part of the development is made up of dilapidated and sometimes abandoned houses. The task of the master plan is to focus on the reconstruction and restoration of existing buildings, while somewhat limiting the new construction and maintaining the existing density.
Another and, perhaps, the most difficult task that the master plan must solve concerns transport. According to Marat Khusnullin, a decision has already been made to build 150 km of metro lines, the existing railways will be involved in the urban transport system, and it is planned to build another 220 km of railways. In addition, powerful transport hubs will be built. And the road network will continue to develop along the path of road expansion, since the construction of new ones is too expensive for the city's budget.
Chief Architect of Moscow Sergey Kuznetsov pointed out such problems of the city as the pendulum migration of the population, provoking an aggravation of the transport situation, the lack of a comfortable and functional environment in the peripheral parts of the city, the imbalance of the density of development with the density of the road network. According to the architect, a fundamental moment in the development of a master plan should be a detailed analysis of the existing situation: first, to realize what the city lacks, then to set a task, and then to develop methods for its solution.
The main principles of the document being prepared, as Sergei Kuznetsov said, are the gradation of territories into private and public, the self-sufficiency of each individual district, which in no case should be just a "place to sleep", "the absence of segregation into underdeveloped and elite districts", and the unconditional priority of the pedestrian as the main participant in the traffic.“Just as a drop of water reflects the entire structure of the oceans, so each individual fragment of the building characterizes the city as a whole,” Sergei Kuznetsov noted, “And the master plan is the constitution of the city, a dynamic document that allows us to make adjustments, reacting in a timely manner to changes. economic and social situation”.
First Deputy Director of the Research and Development Institute of the General Plan of Moscow Karima Nigmatullina in her report, she introduced the audience to the experience of 14 most comfortable cities for life in Europe, Asia, North and South America. Of course, Moscow cannot directly adopt their development strategy, however, according to Nigmatullina, the Russian capital has a lot to learn from each of them when developing its own master plan.
The invited foreign experts have added variety to the discussion of countless Moscow problems by sharing their successful experience of city planning. So, the head of the department of territorial planning Shaap tone spoke about Amsterdam, where, according to him, the main function of the master plan is water resources management: “Everything is very simple for us - keeping the river in the banks so as not to drown and to keep our feet dry. And you have more land than you need, so it is difficult to plan."
Thomas Madreiter, the head of the Smart City Vienna project, tried to find something in common between Moscow and Vienna. Vienna, like Moscow, is a growing city with a constant increase in population. At one time, Vienna also went through a stage of de-industrialization. Today the Austrian capital is rightfully called a “smart city” with a stable quality of life, developed public and bicycle transport, etc. Moscow is still at the very beginning of the journey.
Tim Stonor, UK-based director of Space Syntax advised to look at the city's streets as its "economic, social and cultural asset". Streets, avenues and boulevards are the arteries of the city. But in order to assess how correctly and harmoniously the urban street system is built, one must ask the question: is it possible to easily and easily walk or ride a bicycle from one part of the city to another? It is clear that in the case of Moscow, the answer will be unequivocally negative.
Dean of the Faculty of RANEPA Sergey Zuev, who also acted as an expert in discussing the new master plan for Moscow, proposed an interesting formula for solving the city's problems, which, according to him, is well suited for Moscow: “if you want to do something, do something else”. The operation of this principle can be observed on the example of the same transport problem. Sergey Zuev is convinced that the better the roads, the more traffic jams in the city - for the simple reason that even more people will travel to the city on good roads. In solving the transport problem, first of all, it is necessary to deal with the creation of alternative centers, the separation of administrative and cultural functions, the construction of multifunctional residential buildings, an increase in the connectedness of territories (but in no way the density of traffic flow), and an increase in the cost of maintaining a car. Many more similar measures can be applied, and all of them, according to Sergei Zuev, precede the construction and expansion of roads in importance.
The discussion ended on an optimistic note of speeches Andrey Golovin from Perm, who spoke about the Russian experience in implementing the master plan, and Oliver Schulze from Denmark, who noted the uniqueness of Moscow, its dissimilarity from other cities in the world. What's good about Moscow becoming a copy of, say, Vancouver? Each city should have its own face, and Moscow does.
