Last week there was a lot of discussion in blogs about the problems of Russian urbanism. Anton Shatalov, for example, started an interesting discussion in his magazine on the topic of urban spaces. According to the blogger, the residents of Russian cities owe the lack of places for communication of people, such as classic squares, squares and streets, to Soviet urban planners who did not make a distinction between private and public: “The free planning of cities gave free rein to the architect's imagination, and we got bizarre drawings on the ground (among the people "sausages", "squiggles", "worms") and the complete absence of classical spaces, - the author of the blog notes. "What was private by definition became public, and what was public became nobody's."
To put things in order in the courtyards of apartment buildings, thus, it is possible only by convincing their residents that the courtyard is their private space, concludes Anton Shatalov. And here is the user Alexander Antonov
in the RUPA community notes that so far this theory works only in the historical quarter development; the population of modernist microdistricts actively resists “recartalization”: “I think it is necessary in our cities to allow anyone's space between houses to be cut into plots of 2 acres and to make vegetable gardens with fences - this will go with a bang, a free low-density 5-storey building, and inside it fences, sheds, cellars, sheep shelters”. Alexander Lozhkin notes in the comments that it is the quarter that is "the most reasonable tool to distinguish between the private and the public." Borders, adds Anton Shatalov, should be noted by means of design, taking as an example, for example, practical Germans, who, as the blogger writes, “are good at repartitioning and humanizing old GDRv microdistricts”.
The author of the blog townplanner.livejournal.com writes in more detail about how they learned to reconstruct typical neighborhoods in Europe. Realizing that the approval of the microdistrict as the basic unit of urban settlement is the last century, the Europeans, writes the townplanner, nevertheless, did not begin to demolish the entire legacy of modernism. Instead, they are rebuilding panel high-rise buildings and changing the layout of typical neighborhoods. Something similar, notes the author of the blog, was proposed, in particular, by the authors of the Perm master plan of the KCAP bureau. However, as Alexander Lozhkin comments, the modernization of standard housing in Russia is a matter of the future; while the more urgent for municipalities is the resettlement of barracks and the private sector.
Unlike urbanists, ordinary residents do not always understand the value of low-density neighborhood development. For example, some of the residents of the Budennovsky workers' settlement, which the Moscow authorities have planned for demolition, do not mind exchanging it for a panel high-rise building. In Europe, such a village with a settlement of 20 people per square kilometer, unique for a metropolis, would have long ago been made an elite quarter. And in Moscow, an indisputable monument of constructivism, in defense of which Pyotr Nalich writes in his blog on Snob.ru, now it may well become a victim of those who specially brought their housing to an emergency state in the hope of relocating from a communal apartment to a separate apartment.
The low density, in turn, is also valuable for the private sector, which still remains within the boundaries of many large cities. However, as the Internet voting on the onliner.by portal on Minsk shows, many people look in bewilderment at the “villages” in the city center. “The private sector is not green oases, but dull, dilapidated buildings enclosed by fences, around which mud and debris is piled up,” writes, for example, Yurand2. "I am all for the parks, but against these abscesses."At the same time, there were quite a few opponents of the consolidation and "panel ghettos" in the network; in their opinion, it is necessary to preserve the very principle of estate development, but "not with pigs in a shed, but quite well-groomed."
Blogger Ilya Varlamov dedicated a separate post to the courtyards of apartment buildings. The sprouts of self-government here are quite difficult to make their way, in any case, as Varlamov notes, the absolute majority of courtyards in Moscow are chaotic parking, where all the free space is occupied by cars and a small piece is allocated for a playground. Some residents, however, say users, create a completely successful homeowners association, put things in order in the courtyard, but at the same time they are forced to fence off with a fence. True, they are a minority, but the majority are either not ready to spend their money on landscaping, or consider this idea to be initially a failure.
Fedor Novikov
in the blog of the radio station "Echo of Moscow" I am sure that the urban community is not only able to put things in order in its courtyard, but also to govern the whole city. In the future, the mayor and the administration will not be needed, the blogger believes: it is from the residents whom the urban studies of the last century considered incapable of self-government that "the comfort of the urban environment and the ability of the city to quickly respond to problems and resolve them will largely depend." To begin with, residents need to at least “learn to choose a leader on the staircase,” retorts user lebedev_64 to the author. Vadimp believes that in the post-industrial era, megacities will generally be de-urbanized, but pavel_liberal fully believes that the mayor in the near future "will not be some kind of sacred power, but a real technical figure - a city manager elected on transparent competitive conditions."
At that time, the Arkhnadzor blog was discussing the draft design of the ZIL territory, published on the website. The former industrial giant is going to be rebuilt either into a technopolis or into the so-called. "Mixed-use", while demolishing most of the production buildings that have not been used. Only the “core of protection” is subject to preservation, to which the audience of “Arkhnadzor” was outraged: “Shame. Now "Arhnadzor" publishes articles justifying the demolitions, - comments, for example, the user Sergey. "Without telling in detail about what is being demolished, without talking about alternatives and methods of salvation."
Meanwhile, another dispute unfolded between Arkhnadzor and Russian Railways over the project for the restoration of the Circular Depot. As Vladimir Yakunin, President of Russian Railways, writes in his blog, a variant was approved for implementation, "as close as possible to the historical appearance of the building, but involving the dismantling of nine radius cells-stalls from the side of the projected railways." In "Arhnadzor" it was regarded as the destruction of half of the newly acquired monument. Bloggers, in turn, are wondering what the rebuilt locomotive depot will be used for and criticize Russian Railways for the numerous demolitions of old train stations and stations, in the place of which, for example, user Sergei Golovkov writes, “some kind of 'modules' resembling containers (wagons) ". Meanwhile, in the blog novser.livejournal.com, the current dispute has become the reason for an Internet poll: users vote for and against reconstruction.
Returning at the end to the main topic of the review - the fate of the microdistrict development, we present the original opinion of Mikhail Belov. In his recent note on the Roman Pantheon, the architect remarked: “When a conditional demos is in power, everything is plundered and slums are built; when a tyrant comes, then pyramids and monuments are among these slums. " Modernity imposes modernist values and new Pantheons have not appeared in it for a hundred years, the architect notes: “This is how we live. We are born in the devil knows what buildings; we live, however, in different; but we get sick and die again, the devil knows what. We bury each other in a terrible and ugly, and worst of all, tasteless and aging environment."
