The Moscow Urban Forum recently ended, a large multidisciplinary conference of Russian and foreign experts with the participation of the Moscow government, commissioned by the Strelka Institute for the third year in a row [upd: Strelka is organizing the forum for the second time. We apologize for the inaccuracy.].
Many people I met at the forum called it a "plenum of the party", while others (among them urbanists), on the contrary, believe that "long and prolonged applause did not work out." If this is a plenum, then it is of a new formation: not too informal, but also not very official. Well-organized, well-lit in every sense - about 2/3 of the sessions held simultaneously are available on video. (here or here), and on Saturday there was a festival day open to everyone with 50 events at 20 venues, this is in one day - however, for the first time and, according to the organizers, this is an unprecedented step for such conferences.
In the eyes of an outsider, not immersed in urbanism, the festival - well-organized, large-scale, international, and in many ways remarkable - resembles the house of Cheburashka's friends, built in order to make everyone friends. Or Kipling's water truce: government officials, with their optimistic and reassuring speeches, are laconic and mostly young looking. The experts listen to people from the audience, who, in turn, do not shout. Developers are quiet, grouping around the perimeter of the hall around stands with large projects, and in discussions are represented by their intellectual avant-garde - consultants. In hall "A" Sergei Sobyanin speaks (he spoke a lot), in another hall Alexei Venediktov talks about the meaning of protests and civic activity [upd: as it turned out, he did not come], and the exhibition contains brochures that show how the districts of Moscow with good prosperity, they vote for Navalny and Prokhorov, and unhappy Kapotnya and the southeast cut off from the center, which more than others feels itself as a periphery, non-Moscow, vote for Sobyanin and Putin.
It is very joyful to see that all these poles have come together, calmly discussing the city's plans for the future, but on the other hand, there is no certainty that they hear each other, or rather hear something, but whether they are listening is a question. There is a persistent feeling of parallel currents flowing in one river without mixing too much. I do not argue that this general trend itself is already an important matter, but so far, perhaps only on an emotional level, there is a feeling of a beautiful and stormy, but somewhat idle, working mechanism: it is not clear whether its wheels are engaged, that is, whether the authorities hear the proposals of experts, is there any movement forward, or just a discussion. Will all this mass of great offers benefit? Nobody knows this, and nobody seems to be sure about it. The water truce does not imply a continuation of the topic, but only the likelihood of repetition during the next drought.
But in the end, the increment of knowledge is evident one way or another. Especially for the forum, the architectural bureau "Project Meganom" and the institute "Strelka" prepared a study published under the poetic title "Archeology of the Periphery". It was shown at the forum in the form of an exhibition and three copies of a thick tome (about 500 pages) nailed to a low table in the center of the hall. The organizers, however, promise to publish the book in large circulation after a while and put it in PDF on the forum's website. In the meantime, for acquaintance, I had to be content with stories and materials of the exhibition, however, beautiful and informative (among other things, the laconic-representative design of the hall and a small exposition of Yuri Palmin's brilliant photographs, as always, were responsible for the beauty).
The topic of the forum was the development of megacities outside the center, while the institute focused its research on the ring between the Third Ring Road and the Moscow Ring Road, excluding not only the center and the “semi-periphery” beyond the Third Ring, but also new residential areas of the Zamkadye. This decision was probably inevitable - less than a year was given to work with a huge territory. But it limited the authors' attention to the "panel bagel", which consists of 77% of Soviet housing estates (another 14% are high-rise buildings built after 1991).
Here are some excellent statistics presented at the exhibition:
0.4% - the "first periphery" is occupied by workers' settlements of the 1920s-1930s;
1.4% - individual dwelling houses, villages;
7% - Stalinist buildings;
22.1% - five-story buildings;
28.1% - panel houses of early series of 9-12 floors;
27% - panel houses of 14-22 floors;
7.7% - sealing buildings of the 1990-2000s (towers among micro-districts);
6.3% - residential complexes of the XXI century (microdistricts built after 1991).
According to the "SPACED method", which was previously used for teaching at Strelka, the project participants were divided into groups "sociology" [S], "politics" [P], "architecture and urban planning" [A] (the latter thus turned out not even section and subsection), “culture” [C], “economics” [E] and “data” [D].
They were joined by an international section - articles by foreign experts on megacities; The hallmark of each metropolis has become its PAR index: the ratio of the total area to the area of the center. The largest periphery is in Chicago, its PAR 380, in Sao Paulo - 117. In Singapore, the PAR is the smallest - 3.8 (it is not surprising that “the word“outskirts there”does not have a negative connotation - Onur Ekmekchi). The average PAR of Moscow is 20, although here it should be taken into account that the center was calculated within the Third Transport Ring, and if we count it within the Garden Ring, then the PAR of Moscow will turn out to be not 20, but 67, which indicates measurement errors.
Mainly Megafon was responsible for Data [upd: Thomson Reuters in partnership with Mathrioshka and Megafon]: beautiful interactive schemes on large screens based on the analysis of the movement of mobile phone signals [upd: not signals, but more complex data about the load on the cellular network - thanks to Kate Serova]. One of the main conclusions: not so many people go to the center from the periphery as we thought: only 10%, 2/3 stay at home or near the house, the rest move inside the periphery. Of all trips to the metropolitan area, trips to Moscow - 18%, and only 5% get to the center.
This conclusion is interesting, but it should be noted that 10% is "not so much" only in comparison with our emotional ideas: at rush hour it seems that everyone is going to the center. It is amazing that these 10% (and, note, only Megaphone users) are able to clog the existing roads to the eyeballs. However, in Moscow there is still no transport collapse, - experts reassure, - a collapse is when a person spends the night in a car, standing in a traffic jam and cannot get home at all. On the other hand, the semantic analysis of social networks shows that "sleeping areas" do not generate interest, everyone thinks only of the center, although they live in residential areas.
Sociologists from the Levada Center, in their section, did not consider agglomeration, but focused, as planned, on the “panel bagel” to the Moscow Ring Road. Conclusion: the population of the Soviet neighborhoods is especially conservative, inactive and does not want changes. Many do not go to the center at all, or only to go to the theater.
“The first periphery” of Moscow is a frozen, conserved territory - Yuri Grigoryan echoes in his chapter (“Architecture and Urban Planning”). In the 1960s – 1970s, it developed more spontaneously than according to plan: more precisely, architects and city planners did not keep up with the building complex and party decisions, but only legalized them in the general plans. The last master plan that planned something was the 1957 master plan, writes Sergei Sitar. The wave of growth of microdistricts spread at first along the roads, leaving green enclaves between the radii, which were gradually overgrown with housing. After 1991, the wave splashed outside the Moscow Ring Road, and the "panel bagel" froze, fell asleep with its unkempt modernist spaces. The authors, following the example of the first ideologue of Strelka Rem Koolhaas, call this development "retroactive" - that is, fixing what happened. It's funny that at one time this fixation took place under the opposite sign of energetic planning - however, the insincerity of the Soviet planned economy is well known, and for historians the conclusion about the retroactivity of the development of micro-districts is interesting.
In general, it is curious that the authors of the "Architecture" section treat panel micro-districts with the tenderness of historians, and not with the energy of transformers. They carefully find inside the Soviet building old roads, "turned into paths" and parks of old estates: "Twenty-four of the thirty-four MKAD interchanges are located on the sites of old roads and villages." The most interesting painstaking work of comparing old maps with new ones shows how traditional Moscow has the potential to preserve its structure, even its dictate - it is possible that because of the poverty of Soviet modernists (modern construction, alas, has a greater energy of destruction). Carried away by the traces of the past in the panel areas, this treasure for a local historian, the authors immediately admit that the practical meaning of such a study is small … although many monuments, including modernism, still require research.
Surprisingly, the dull, conservative and sleepy, prone to degradation, Soviet micro-districts so fascinated their researchers that, considering the idea of a garden city in their plan as a professional eye, the authors proposed to preserve, develop and increase it. Indeed, if the decisions of the party and the government were spontaneous, and the building complex overtook the architects (let's be honest, it still overtakes in all, practically, positions and this study can be understood as a very delicate attempt to regain the lost influence), then the "overgrowth" with Soviet microdistricts took place altogether not chaotically, but according to a strictly defined gene code, which goes back equally to the earlier idea of the garden city and to the later one - the sun city of Corbusier.
And so, despite the universal love of our contemporaries for the neighborhoods, the Strelka researchers propose to carefully preserve the Soviet neighborhoods, improve them (finally) and thus manifest the bright ideals of modernism that were laid there. A bold idea, I must admit.
The authors find the neighborhoods "well connected, passable, evenly saturated with remnants of Soviet infrastructure and cultural objects." They propose to consider the "panel bagel" as a Superpark: "a grand park of life, culture, science, art, recreation and work." The brochures published from the book are called the "Superpark library" and are generally subordinated to this idea: to preserve the modernist garden city, to clean, improve and turn into a park ring between two layers of a more saturated (and active) urban fabric: the center and new, denser Zamadov districts …
You can even feel that the authors regard all this poor, drained and sloppy fabric of the "donut" neighborhoods - also as a kind of (super?) Monument. Hence the view on the topic, more like the view of a historian who seeks to clean and “restore”, breathe new life into the forgotten values, in this case, the values of the Soviet microdistrict. "Carefully restore the potential of free planning."
With such a delicate approach, there are about three development resources. The first, large and obvious, is the reorganization of industrial zones. On their territories, in no case can a lot of new housing be built, but - jobs, new industries, public spaces and new roads and streets, which should increase the permeability and connectivity of areas with each other, reduce the number of "overruns",forced trips through the center. Meanwhile, one can imagine how upset the developers will be: it is known that housing is a commodity, the demand for which in Moscow is constantly high, it will not take long to build and quickly sell. In a word, the regulation is quite tough.
The second resource is the development of transport (not only due to the reorganization of industrial zones). Three schemes given by the authors are indicative here: places where the transport network is well saturated are opposite to the spots of the highest population density, in other words, there is a lot of transport where there are few people, and vice versa. But the most interesting thing is that the scheme for the development of transport by 2025 (I suppose, borrowed from the revised updating of the General Plan) does not plan to solve the issue of its unrelatedness with the density of settlement, remaining a centripetal "web". Moscow, as a metropolis, has two functions that are sagging: cultural entertainment and transport, the PWC study confirms.
The third resource for developing a super-park of panel districts is civil society, municipal activists and local communities of citizens. In other words, experts suggest that the authorities together with municipal civic activists - that is, the least inert part of the population of the conservative belt - are proposing to take care of the super-park. However, the essay on Troparevo-Nikulino, written by a team led by Alexander Vysokovsky, clearly shows how fragile the resource of civil society is and how quickly it declines in an unfavorable political environment.
Citizens' activity in cleaning streets, painting benches, improving city navigation by drawing arrows and a cultural atmosphere by arranging street exhibitions quickly grows into a desire to be heard, to elect their deputies, to receive municipal support, that is, the city's resources for the implementation of their initiatives. The authorities get scared, brush off the formal replies, and soon disperse the hotbed of trouble (which happened in Troparevo-Nikulin). People are moving from a "positive" initiative (read: Subbotniks) to criticism of the authorities, which the latter already understand as negative activity (which is very well described in the essay of Vysokovsky's team). So the idea of organizing landscaping "from below" so far looks bright, but one of the most utopian of all that has been proposed by the authors.
Meanwhile, further the authors [of the study, already in another brochure devoted to the super-park itself] from the idea of a garden come to urban gardening, joint meals in the courtyard of vegetables that residents grow in finely chopped house territories (this pastoral-bucolic thought immediately falls into in resonance with the well-known definition of Moscow as a "big village").
So, the resource of civil society is doubtful - it still needs to be grown (like that vegetable garden). You can imagine a slightly different way of amelioration of the "donut". A department, for example, Capital Construction, gets some (suppose a very large) budget, arranges bushes, trees and benches and rearranges streets and sidewalks and makes playgrounds as good as within the TTK. At the same time, some large institution, for example, Strelka, takes the remnants of the old Soviet infrastructure of libraries and clubs and creates from them a network of cultural centers - European, "cool" and "hipster-friendly" - roughly like a network of "Houses of New Culture »DNA in the province. In Russia, it is better to do what is done centrally (just look at the new halls of Sberbank in Moscow). It is quite possible to improve the "panel bagel", completely.
The concept of a super-park reflects well the loose character of the urban fabric of these areas: not quite a city, more a park. But - as the network of micro-districts grew "retroactively", that is, in an organized and chaotic manner, so its further life and habitation took place in a completely natural way, especially in the last period. Rozalia Tarnovetskaya and Margarita Chubukova under the guidance of Grigory Revzin and according to the method of “integral analysis of social and urban data” proposed by Alexander Gavrilov are examining the result of the spontaneous development of microdistricts in the “Culture” section. This section of the study turned out to be the most exciting, and was especially popular at the exhibition.
In short: the authors collected data from open sources on the distribution of various social functions (from libraries and universities to shops and spas), created maps of the density of these functions in the form of "thermal schemes", and found several proto- or meta - cities (the term was proposed by Grigory Revzin): enclaves saturated with different functions are much better than neighboring territories. These are places ready to develop further and turn into full-fledged urban spaces, explains Rozaliya Tarnovetskaya, “they can take on more complex functions. However, each such formation has a very different nature - she immediately explains.
Indeed, two enclaves of urban activity are the “prominences” of the Moscow center: Butyrskaya Street, which runs from the Savelovsky Market and “German Sloboda” along the Yauza River to the village of Preobrazhenskoye - Petrovskaya Moscow. As Rustam Rakhmatullin reminded me, who was interestedly examining the layers with maps printed on separate tracing paper at the exhibition, the Third Ring did not everywhere coincide with the line of the former border of Moscow, so these, basically very old, parts of the city fabric, Butyrskaya and Nemetskaya Sloboda, must be admitted caught in the framework of the periphery by accident. The authors, I must say, also recognize the gravitation of these enclaves to central Moscow.
Two other "metacities" were formed around Akademicheskaya and Profsoyuznaya streets, and in the Sokol area; there are many scientific institutes and Stalinist residential buildings. The academic status of this territory and its large quarterly buildings immediately indicate a difference from the usual micro-district fabric towards more urban, and in this case, more cultural. The Maryino enclave in the southeast was formed differently: until the 1990s, there were at first fields for water purification, and then for a long time nothing was built. This place was built up after 1991 with giant houses, very densely, but on the first floors, shops and other functions were immediately provided. In addition, here people bought, not received apartments, so they can afford a cafe, a bathhouse, and a nail salon; Maryino turns out to be a fragment of another, Zamadovskaya Moscow. So one can argue with the authors when they talk about the spontaneity of the development of the proto-urban fabric, about the fact that "metacities" grow in the loose landscape of Soviet micro-districts in a natural way - the researchers themselves admit that each of them has its own reason to grow here: nothing they would not have grown if they had not been planted here.
So it can be said in another way: residential neighborhoods that grew up on party regulations, and academic townships (that grew up on them, but earlier), and the city of office workers that grew up on money - simply have a different internal structure from the very beginning, and if the former belong towards the modernist project, the latter began to emerge before its heyday, and the third after its decline; about the pieces of the historic city, to be sure, they definitely were before. It turns out that the garden city in this neighborhood is even more unique - as the idea of settling a bunch of people in a park, it is more difficult and requires urban planning efforts and regulation - no matter what we are told about retroactivity, and no matter what we observe during life in terms of cheapness and durability realization of a great idea, this is precisely an idea, a trace of a gigantic project, and one can understand architects who want to preserve all this as a monument. We see that as soon as the regulation goes away and money starts to build on its own, the resettlement of a large number of people begins to gravitate again towards the urban (more precisely, just urban) fabric.
The idea of "meta-cities" definitely resonates with the idea of developing polycentrism, which is planned to be included in the new general plan of Moscow (however, in the 1971 plan, the creation of centers on the periphery was laid down and it was not possible to create them - Dmitry Fesenko commented to me at the exhibition) … Metacities may or may not become such centers: during a session dedicated to polycentrism, chaired by Alexander Vysokovsky, the majority of participants voted for polycentrism, but even more so that we do not yet have the necessary sufficient information to make a decision. about the possibility of the creation of peripheral centers or the influence of the main center will not allow them to be born.
In a word, if the “Architecture” section calls for turning the space of the first periphery into a super-park, then “Culture” pulls in the direction of thickening the urban fabric, changing the qualities of space not in the direction of the garden, but in the direction of the city. What can be understood as positions somewhat opposite, although not contradicting each other: as if real cities are growing in the midst of a modernist garden city before our eyes, and the authors propose both to cultivate and develop, without contradicting their immanent properties - such, one must think, is the delicate and intelligent conclusion from this massive, albeit cursory, study.
I would like to know how the research will be used further, whether it will lie on the table or become a base (or at least an incentive) for deeper and more detailed work, using not only open, but all city data - I was struck by the words of Yuri Grigoryan that the information of the city departments of the authors was not admitted: "the data are secret, and their lists are also classified." This is, of course, not how the concept of megalopolis development is made. In this light, the name "Archeology of the Metropolis" looks ambiguous: firstly, archeology works with dead material, and here half-dead modernist areas are explored, and secondly, the authors dig up information for research as archaeologists, from where they can, and draw their conclusions in the same way … The huge semi-secret city, like the extinct ancient culture without epic and written language, is equally difficult to study - and this is another characteristic feature of Moscow. So far, everything looks approximately as if archaeologists came to people from the Trypillian culture, and explain: guys, we discovered that you tend to build houses around round squares, now let's do it according to science.
In other words, the 500-page study does not look like the end, but the beginning, a poster call to research the data before making decisions and a living example of what can be done with information even when the official part of it is not available.
