Architect Ilya Zalivukhin, who presented the sensational concept of the strategic master plan for Moscow the day before, seriously alarmed the transport engineers who rushed to protect their "fiefdom". “When a Russian architect tries to regain the territory that was historically given to transport engineers, it looks terribly unconvincing and somewhere dramatic,” Anna Shevchenko said critically about the project. The author of the blog bzikoleaks.livejournal.com, who continued the discussion, is sure that an architect with his mental images should not invade the field of research and calculations, especially when there is no more or less scientific basis behind the beautiful pictures with egg-enclaves. There is nothing new in the idea of a second circuit of highways, writes bzikoleak, "proposals to build" correct "highways in supposedly uninhabited areas along railways are regularly put forward in the press and on the Internet both by well-known transport figures like Mikhail Blinkin or Anton Buslov, and by ordinary people." But in terms of the cost of construction, these highways are several times higher than the laying of a subway of the same length, warns bzikoleaks. The blogger reminds those who believe in another panacea for getting rid of Moscow from traffic jams - several highways 15 km each will hardly play a significant role for citywide traffic against the backdrop of thousands of kilometers of conventional UDS.
But Ilya Zalivukhin's concept immediately acquired many supporters who like that it was made proactively and free of charge, borrows sound ideas, including the social aspect of the transport problem, Viktor Moskalev writes in the comments, proposing to form centers of attraction in different regions, etc.. P. Defending the concept from critics, user intensio notes that the very idea of diverting transit traffic from neighborhoods to dedicated highways to industrial zones and right-of-way around railways, although not new, is still sensible for Moscow. “This is not a separation of the city, but, on the contrary, filling it with local centers of life. Now the outskirts are amorphous and meaningless. It will be good if they consolidate into distinct urban entities,”the blogger adds. Alexander Pishchalnikov also agrees with the need to withdraw transit traffic from the neighborhoods, noting, however, that even with this approach, it is not a fact that the laying of highways is a priority. “It seems to me, first of all, it would be necessary to build the metro at a Beijing pace,” the user concludes.
By the way, the Chinese are now often cited as an example in terms of their approach to urbanism. On the Facebook page of the same Ilya Zalivukhin, the problems of the Moscow metropolitan area are proposed to be solved in Beijing or Shanghai. However, among experts, pessimism is more common. For example, Vasily Baburov is sure that there are no comfortable megacities with a population of over 15 million in the world in principle: "The best among these heavyweights are New York and Tokyo, where I personally would not like to live." And according to Nikita Tokarev, Moscow hardly has a future “like a city, that is. in a certain way meaningful and organized spatial environment”; which, of course, does not exclude the possibility of local improvements - "remove transport from the embankment, make several pedestrian streets …".
Will the quality of life in the metropolis improve the quarterly residential development, which has recently been promoted by the chief architect Sergei Kuznetsov, the architects argue. Yuri Kochetkov in the blog m2.ru/ukochetkov/blogs, for example, believes that it will worsen: the classic square-square, outlined by "fighting streets", according to the blogger, means that most of the apartment windows will hang over the roadway. At RUPA, the author of the polemical note was quick to correct that the block development is not the only perimeter, but, first of all, as Yaroslav Kovalchuk writes, a dense and connected network of streets, inside which there can be anything: towers, parks, etc. Another innovation in Moscow, by the way, is expected in early November, when, as they write on the PRORUS page, projects of new, completely transparent police buildings will be presented to the public.
Transport problems or problems with the architectural heritage in Russian cities are not only a matter of architects and urbanists, but also of officials. Sometimes the former go to the latter and it turns out well: in the spring of this year, the famous Samara city advocate and architect Vitaly Stadnikov unexpectedly took the chair of the chief architect of the city. True, he left it just as unexpectedly the other day, as Armen Arutyunov reports in his blog. “Each such trip changes the system. Vitalik had a hand in this break, and it's good,”Irina Irbitskaya comments on her resignation at RUPA. Alexander Lozhkin notes that the chief architect, in principle, does not have the ability to justify the hopes placed on him. However, according to Yaroslav Kovalchuk, Vitaly Stadnikov succeeded in something - “a new project of PZZ has developed, stopped and reformatted several of the most terrible projects for the development of new territories. The changes have begun."
Blogger Ilya Varlamov also wrote about historical Samara this week, according to whom it is high time to make a tourist center out of the old city, even preserving its "shabby atmosphere". This means that the crumbling wooden houses need to be preserved; but “if you don’t want to live with small windows without air conditioning, move to a new house on the outskirts,” Varlamov writes. Meanwhile, the blogger did not find 100% support among the audience. Varlamov, for example, was told that if one simply prohibits the rebuilding of wooden barracks, only marginals will remain in the center, everything will fall apart and the tourist potential will have to be forgotten.
However, Ilya Varlamov himself is probably not surprised at such pragmatic comments, since, as it turned out, he does not believe in the architectural taste of the Russian population. And the blogger was disappointed by the results of his voting for the most beautiful metro station, scheduled for the coming year. More than half chose Rumyantsevo - according to Varlamov, the most mediocre and helpless project, “a hodgepodge of modern grilles, pseudo-classical windows, strange ardekosh columns, crowned with the roof of a village barn”.
Well, in the community of urbanists, the city activist himself was worthy of discussion. Urbanists argued about how useful the participation of “City Projects” and other young intellectual amateurs in the processes of urban organization can be. For example, according to Alexander Vodyanik, “that journalists, that“not indifferent”are not just dilettantes, but militant foams”. But Alexander Lozhkin is sure that the expert community is unlikely to be able to generate topics in a language that is understandable to the layman; “It must be repeated a million times so that the gear moves in the heads of those who make decisions. And only then comes our time for professionals. “It will not work to combine“going out to the public”and“standing at the drawing board,”agrees Alexander Antonov. “Therefore, the former successfully generate beautiful ideas without understanding how to implement them, while the latter successfully implement traditional approaches.” Nothing will budge until the “new activists” come into the management system and take full responsibility, the architect concludes.
