In previous essays, I tried to talk about modern urban regulation tools used in the world. The main of these tools is the urban planning regulations, which have been successfully applied for more than a hundred years all over the world, but not in Russia. However, in tsarist Russia, in some places such regulation was, for example, in Riga (which I already wrote about), where a very simple regulation was introduced according to the German model: the height of the building should not exceed the width of the street. With rare exceptions, this regulation was informally observed in the historical part of Riga during the Soviet era, and today it again has the force of law. The building parameters in St. Petersburg were also strictly regulated: buildings were not allowed to be indented from the red line, and the height of "civilian" structures should not exceed the level of the eaves of the Winter Palace. The scandal with the tower on the building of the Singer company on Nevsky Prospekt, which exceeded this mark, is widely known.
In general, to date, only three ways have been invented how to manage the development of the city - three models of urban regulation. The first one I would call “utopian”, architects love it very much. It is assumed that it is possible to develop a certain architectural development project, which will then be carried out as planned. Detached buildings are erected in exactly this way: the architect gives the customer a project according to which he is building. In this case, there is a single customer and the project implementation period is usually short, but the designers will confirm: situations when the result is seriously different from the one intended by the architect are more the rule than the exception. When we talk about urban planning, where there can be many different customers for different objects, and the implementation is designed for decades, the architectural project turns into a utopia that will never be built as drawn in the project. Even in the Soviet Union, when there was a single customer, not one of the hundreds of detailed planning projects was 100% implemented, and what has been done demonstrates the complete collapse of the “utopian” urban regulation model.
The above model is a product of the modernist belief in the possibility of "life-building". Even in the conditions of a totalitarian state, the possibilities for its implementation were seriously limited, and the results were corrected by financial capabilities and administrative interference in the construction process. Today, attempts to build neighborhoods and cities based on architectural designs can only be spoken of as pure utopias. However, they continue to design and approve such projects in Russia everywhere, and, what is much more terrible, it is in accordance with this model that students in architectural universities continue to learn how to arrange cubes on models of microdistricts and do not learn to think about how a city designed in this way will be built and exist.
The unviability of attempts to build a city according to pre-conceived architectural projects led in the Soviet Union to the emergence of a different, real mechanism for regulating urban planning activities. Someone should be personally responsible for the harmonious development of the city? Let's choose a person with impeccable taste, sensitively and subtly understanding the city, principled and incorruptible, probably possessing the highest mind in the field of urban planning, and appoint him as the chief of the development! We will give him the supreme authority to decide what is good and what is bad, and let him determine what and how can be built on a particular site. Let's call him the Chief Architect and give him the Council of Colleagues-Sages (or the architectural and town-planning council) to help him, and let them decide the fate of the city. We see how this works in practice every day. For some reason, all the time it turns out that the chief architects of cities, called upon to have a higher reason and delicate taste, do not possess it, their incorruptibility is overcome in various ways, and councils from urban planning are transformed into defensive ones, protecting their own (first of all, members of the Council) and rejecting outsiders. And the cities of Russia still cannot be called a model of the quality of the architectural environment. And more and more often the "divine" powers from architects are intercepted by mayors, Yuri Mikhailovich Luzhkov with his selfless love for architecture is the first example here.
I know of only one case when the “divine” model of urban regulation worked in Russia. This is Nizhny Novgorod in the late 1990s, the era of Alexander Kharitonov. As the chief architect of the city and a practicing architect, he turned out to be both a formal and an informal leader of Nizhny Novgorod designers and an absolute authority for all those involved in the development of the city. The authority was reinforced by the accuracy of the decisions made, by his own impeccable buildings and the myth of the "Nizhny Novgorod school" directed by him, spreading at lightning speed throughout Russia and beyond its borders. But this case is only an exception that proves the rule. As soon as Kharitonov was gone (he died in a car accident in 1999), the myth was dispelled, and commercial buildings began their invasion of the historic quarters, which had previously retained the "spirit of the place" even with the interventions of modern architecture.
So, neither the “utopian” nor the “divine” model works in today's conditions. We see that with their help it is not possible to create an environment in our cities that is at least remotely close in quality to that of a traditional city. At the same time (I have shown examples in previous essays), in Europe, modern areas are very often not inferior in quality to the historical environment. There is no “divine” model of urban regulation, but architectural and urban planning projects are being developed, but they are accompanied by legal instruments for implementation. That is, it is not enough to draw pictures and make a layout showing how the future district will look like - it is also important to develop legally binding mechanisms for its implementation, as was done, for example, by Stiman in Berlin.
Does such a model need a chief architect? In my opinion, yes, but in a different role than now. Not as a dictator-coordinator, but as the main city consultant without authority, as in Riga. There, the chief architect does not approve the project documentation and does not develop standards, but they definitely go to him for advice before construction. He is like a conductor, called upon to harmonize the sound of buildings built by different architects in the city. Solo architects are responsible to their customers, and the chief architect is responsible to the city for how their buildings will fit into it.
So, the third model of urban regulation is “legal”. The developers of the 2004 Urban Development Code of Russia, which laid the foundations for modern city development management through the development of territorial development documents (territorial development schemes and master plans), understood that it is impossible to regulate the development of the city through a utopian project or “divine” instructions. documents for the planning of the territory (planning projects, land surveying, town planning plans of land plots) and town planning regulations for the rules of land use and development. Since 2007, the legal regulation of the development of territories has been the only legal one: few architects and developers know, but for more than 5 years in the Russian Federation, coordination with the authorities of architecture and urban planning has been prohibited, and it is also forbidden to require the approval of the authorities for the protection of monuments during construction in protected zones and any approvals, conclusions and expertise not provided for by the City Planning Code.
The difficult fate of legal urban regulation in Russia - in the next essay.
