At the Moscow Urban Forum 2013, a large study "Archeology of the Periphery" was presented, dedicated to the development of Moscow's periphery. Among the materials in the Politics section in the Superpark Library series, an article prepared by Alexander Lozhkin was published that examines the principles of modern multi-level territorial planning and practical experience in developing a strategic master plan and general plan in Perm. With the permission of the author and copyright holders, we publish this part of the study.
Among the territorial planning documents developed in accordance with the Urban Planning Code, the master plans of urban districts are the most important, since they should determine the characteristics of the development of the largest cities that are actively being built up today. Should, but do not define. Almost all Russian cities with a population of over 500 thousand people during the 2000s. developed or updated existing master plans. However, I cannot name any of them where master plans would really serve as a real basis for building strategic plans and specific development programs.
This is due to several reasons:
If in Soviet times general planning was carried out primarily in order to determine the locations of productive forces, today this task is absent; the objectives of the development of master plans are usually defined vaguely. In most cases, master plans of the 2000s. were developed as fictitious demonstration products designed to solve the problem of their own formal availability, as documents, without which the authorities would be limited in the right to dispose of land. In other cases, master plans were developed in the interests of the development of the construction complex and their main (not always named) goal was to identify investment sites for mass residential development. (fig. 1)
- Lack of goal-setting (or one-sided goal-setting) does not allow to correctly define development tasks, strategies, sequence (“roadmaps”) for the implementation of tasks.
- Master plans do not provide a balanced picture of development: the proposed development prospects are not tied to the city's capabilities for the construction of social, engineering, transport infrastructure, and are not tied to the city's budget and real investments. For example, the General Plan of Novosibirsk (2007) contains plans for construction in 2008-2030. more than 700 km of main roads and more than 40 metro stations, which is absolutely unrealistic in terms of existing budgets. But such decisions in terms of transport predetermine the possibility of multi-storey high-density development of the peripheral areas of the city, which should be served by this hypothetical transport. And these “fantastic” solutions are being translated into planning projects and development projects, which will inevitably lead to unsolvable transport problems in the near future.
- "Excessive" planning leads to a lack of planning: the municipality is constantly faced with a choice of which of the objects proposed by the master plan is more important for it.
- In the master plans, planning horizons are mixed, there are no stages, sequence, priorities. There is no separation of long-term, medium-term and short-term planning and the use of appropriate instruments for each level. As a rule, the general plan is developed for a period of 20-30 years, however, the discrepancy with the real budgetary and investment opportunities leads to the fact that decisions are laid in the duration of the general plan, the implementation of which is possible only in the distant future. At the same time, infrastructure is planned and built today for such “future” solutions. Thus, the already limited budgetary and investment resources are spent inefficiently.
- The developers have little idea of the modern city management mechanisms that exist in Russia and are not familiar with the world's best management practices.
- The city is limited in the ability to choose the strategy of its development, the designer of the master plan, since its choice is limited by the framework of the law on public procurement (94-FZ; since 2014 - the Federal Law on the State Contract System), which presupposes the price and timing of the contract as the main selection criteria. …
- At the same time, the city, as a customer, usually does not understand well what it needs from the general plan and, as a rule, is not able to draw up a high-quality task. The relationship between the developer and the municipality is in most cases rigidly formalized and the customer has few opportunities to influence the design process and the result.
- The ideology of urban planning, professed by most of the practicing Russian urban planners, is based on those borrowed from the West in the 1950s and 1960s. functionalist approaches, expressed, in particular, in the Athenian Charter, recognized today in the world as hopelessly outdated.
- In the Master Plans (and urban planning documents in Russia as a whole), legal elaboration and understanding of the role and place of legal instruments of urban regulation are extremely weak.
Russian legislation does not require the mandatory development of strategic documents for territorial development. However, the transition from a single-level (master plan) to a two-level (strategic master plan + master plan) model of territorial planning of cities seems inevitable if we assume that the master plan should turn from a fictitious demonstrative document or a document that solves the tasks of the construction business into a tool solutions to urban problems.
For the first time in Russia, such a model was implemented in the link Strategic Master Plan - General Plan of Perm, developed in 2008-2010 by the Dutch bureau KCAP and the Perm municipal Bureau of urban projects. Both the master plan and the master plan are at the same time only part of the extensive planning, regulation and development management tools available to the municipality (Fig. 2).
In the two-tier spatial planning model, the Strategic Master Plan (or Spatial Development Strategy) of the city:
- determines the goals and objectives of urban planning policy in conjunction with the socio-economic policy of the city;
- is not a project, but a target forecast. The Strategic Master Plan is not a territorial planning document, but a political agreement;
- gives a general vision of the directions of the city's transformation in a fairly distant future
- contains targets for transformations and strategies and methods to achieve them;
- proceeds from real, not hypothetical resources of its implementation.
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does not replace the master plan. The master plan (as well as the standards of urban design, regulations of the PZZ, planning projects, target programs, etc.) is a tool for the implementation of the Strategic Master Plan. The master plan details and clarifies, in accordance with the available resources, the first 2-3 stages of the master plan implementation
(Figure 3);
can be adjusted after completing each of the stages of its implementation
The strategic master plan can be allegorically presented as a vision of the future city on the planning horizon that we are, in principle, able to see. It is a set of fairly idealized goals and roadmaps for achieving them. Naturally, both the vision of goals and the mechanisms for achieving them should change as we approach them.
The master plan in such a model becomes the plan of the first two or three steps to the goal. The degree of elaboration of these steps should be different. The first stage (4-8 years) should contain a set of specific interrelated activities, also linked to long-term budget planning. It is this part of the general plan that is subject to approval and the measures prescribed in it are later reflected in the plans of the functional bodies of the city administration. Planning at this level is predominantly prescriptive and requires building enforcement mechanisms. The planning of subsequent stages is mostly predictive and indicative, and their specification is carried out at the end of the implementation of the first stage. Thus, the general plan from a document developed every 20-30 years, formally rigidly defining plans for the development of the city, but in fact ignored, turns into a regularly (every 4-8 years) actualized document that is actually executable.
It was according to this model that the General Plan of Perm was developed, in which the duration of the first stage was determined at 6 years, the second - 7-12 years. The innovation of the Perm general plan was the rejection of functional zoning in the spirit of the Athenian Charter, when the division of the city's territory into public and business, residential, industrial and warehouse, recreational zones is laid. In the General Plan of Perm, on the functional zoning map, standard rationing territories are displayed, for each of which development parameters are determined, mutually linked into a parametric model. This allows, if necessary, to assess the consequences of certain proposals for the development of territories or management decisions. So, in September 2013, the Bureau of Urban Projects (A. V. Golovin) assessed proposals for amendments to the General Plan of Perm, including the proposals of the PIK group for the development of the territory of the former Bakharevka airport. The analysis showed that the development of this territory will entail an increase in the obligations of the municipality for the construction of social and transport infrastructure by 15 billion rubles. Using the "traditional" model of general planning, such an assessment would be possible only after the development of a detailed project for the planning of the territory.
The two-tier territorial planning model does not contradict the current legislation, however, in Perm, questions arose about the legality of the development of the Strategic Master Plan by the municipality. Although today the Urban Planning Code stipulates that territorial planning documents should be developed on the basis of development strategies, we are talking about programs for the socio-economic development of regions and municipalities, as well as strategies of individual sectors of the economy. It seems advisable to include in this list (perhaps as the main basis for general planning) and spatial development strategies in order to avoid formal approaches to design and the problems that I wrote about above.
The materials of the Perm Strategic Master Plan are available on the website www.permgenplan.ru.
