On February 18, at the Central House of Architects, a meeting was held with Alexander Vysokovsky, Dean of the Higher School of Urbanism. The meeting was devoted to the problems of the city and the search for an answer to the question why there is no systemic urban planning process in Russia and was held within the framework of the Russian Urban Studies program - a joint project of the Union of Moscow Architects and RUPA (NP Association of Planners).
Alexander Vysokovsky began his speech with the theoretical part, because, in his opinion, today, when the profession of an urbanist is again in the spotlight, experts from the field of design still behave as if there was no big Soviet school, there was no huge thickness of knowledge.
Elementary concepts - such as the urban environment, the city as an integral system, etc. - remained outside the field of vision of specialists for a long time. Until now, there is practically no result of urban planning practice in the cities of our country, and the development and implementation of fundamental urban planning documents is progressing extremely sluggishly. In recent years, not a single full-fledged master plan has been created, and attempts to introduce the practice of master planning have remained unsuccessful.
Architecture vs urbanism according to Vysokovsky
Alexander Vysokovsky began his urban studies in the late 1970s. Even then, the difference between urban planning science and architecture was obvious. Urban studies is a very complex process that includes management systems, forecasting, strategic planning, and economics. This science takes into account the interests of the city and its inhabitants, the state and private business. Comparing architectural and urbanistic approaches, Vysokovsky identified several main differences. The architectural approach implies that "every location can be designed in any dedicated configuration." The potential of the site is determined by the architectural design. With its help, the parameters of the development of the territory are set. An object of any purpose can be placed anywhere, if it meets all its parameters and does not contradict the current restrictions. And if the architectural approach implies only situational analysis, then the urbanistic approach presupposes “decision-making based on systematic research of processes distributed in space. A significant advantage of the urbanistic approach is the balance in the management of current tasks and long-term plans, the priority of legal regulation based on normative acts,”Vysokovsky concludes.
So what exactly is an urban environment? According to Vysokovsky's definition, “the human environment is a“mediator”that in a special way connects material objects, phenomena of consciousness and the inner world of a subject (person or group)”. The urban environment is the everyday reality of the "life world", a set of places and objects formed by projects of different levels. People, proceeding from their vital needs, gradually form centers of attraction or, to use Vysokovsky's terminology, “key areas”. Interaction and intersection of all types of activity is formed into a logically and consistently formed urban space.
The urbanist sees his main task in the formation of an "ideal" model of the city, which implies well-grounded and well-developed development plans with fixed results and terms of their achievement. It is especially important here to take into account the interests of all persons involved in the process of forming the urban space. The basis is formed by regulatory documents that define property rights, taxation, current investment and construction, economic and technical processes. At the same time, in order to achieve an optimal result, the managers involved in this process, especially top-level managers, should not follow double standards and work for their own personal interests.
A bit of history: the city of Thünen
Attempts to create such an “ideal” model of spatial development management have been undertaken at different times. There were also non-standard approaches, which, in their essence, are quite applicable to the realities of today. Thus, in the first half of the 19th century, the German economist Johann Heinrich von Thünen compiled an abstract model of a large isolated city-state. It was supposed to be an absolutely self-sufficient city. To do this, the researcher divided his entire space into belts - so that each section would work with the greatest efficiency.
For example, in the first zone of free farming, according to the model he proposed, manure produced in the city is used, which is due to the accumulation of animal-drawn transport - there is simply no other in the city of Thünen. This means that the land can be used most intensively without crop rotations. The border of this belt is dictated by the ratio of transportation and production costs. And specialization is associated with the transportability of products and with the intensity of the production itself. In essence, this belt also concentrates farms with typical suburban specialization.
The second belt is the suburban forests needed to supply the townspeople with fuel and building materials. The third, fourth and fifth zones are grain farming with a decreasing production intensity. This decline with distance from the city of Thünen is justified on the basis of changing rents and the cost of transporting grain. The sixth and seventh belts are devoted to cattle breeding, the intensity of which also decreases in the zones most remote from the city.
An elusive ideal
A city, whatever model it may be - a single-industry city, a compact or monocentric city, an agglomeration-type city or a metropolis - always has a framework, "nodal areas" and, in fact, an urban fabric. In his own practice, Alexander Vysokovsky always begins work with a detailed study of the current situation, identifies historical points of attraction, urban planning zoning - all frame units. If it is possible to build an ideal model of a city on paper, Vysokovsky regrets, then in real life it, as a rule, does not work or does not apply at all.
About Perm: "we started"
A good example is the work on the preparation of the master plan for Perm. Vysokovsky recalled that long before the story of the KCAP master plan, he and a team of other urbanists worked in Perm on a fundamentally new document for that time - on the rules of land use and development. Subsequently, on the basis of this document, all the main urban planning documentation of the city was developed. During the preparation of the LZZ, a huge work was carried out, historical and modern centers, green and park spaces were identified, peripheral zones requiring a lower building density were identified, the system of city connectivity was verified, the length of which is more than 70 km. As a result, the plan of Perm was assembled by Vysokovsky's team like a puzzle by overlaying a variety of grids, taking into account the interests of the city and its citizens, its history and development prospects. Alexander Vysokovsky had a similar practice in Khabarovsk, Nizhny Novgorod, Kazan.
After Vysokovsky, other city planners also worked on the general plan of Perm. As a result, the project was given to the Dutch, who, according to Vysokovsky, offered a lot of interesting solutions. However, according to Vysokovsky, the “last option” does not have a serious basis in the aspects of economic planning, transport, building density, etc.
On the Moscow City: seduction by a beautiful picture An urbanist in our country is still excluded from the process of forming a city. And the architect, as a rule, offers only the form, volume, without giving a specific justification for its appearance in the city. The result is visible to the naked eye, take at least the international business center Moscow City - says Vysokovsky: in the late 1980s and even in the early 2000s, at the stage of concept design, this area seemed completely different. There was a beautiful picture that pleased the customer and the city authorities. No one at that moment thought about how and why this center was being built, what kind of functional content it would have and whether the city's transport system would withstand such a colossal load. As a result, transport interchanges are sorely lacking, as are parking spaces, and there are no intelligible public spaces and areas for pedestrian traffic.
About ZIL: positive lost
According to Vysokovsky, the territory of the ZiL plant, with the right approach, could become one of the most important new centers of attraction in Moscow. Meanwhile, although the very fact of comprehensive planning of the territory after numerous competitions is an undoubted plus, the resulting project does not in any way form a new structure of the city, does not solve the social and environmental problems of the development of this territory. And even those positive moments that could have been noted in the planning project at the initial stage have been almost completely lost by today.
About Skolkovo: it was not worth dividing it into parts between different architects
The last and, perhaps, the most vivid example explaining the absence of a systemic urban planning process in our country is the Skolkovo innovation city. Skolkovo's master plan, which was developed by AREP, according to Vysokovsky, was quite consistent with the idea of a logically built city, in which each site is connected to all the others, centers and squares are highlighted, the main street is designed, and neighborhoods are properly organized. And everything would be fine if the idea of dividing the Skolkovo territory into parts and distributing them to different Moscow architects on the site had not been born. As a result, the city ceased to exist as a city, its cohesion, its structure were destroyed by the ambitions of individual architects and the lack of a clear idea of how the new city should be planned by the city authorities and investors.
