The editorial board of PROJECT RUSSIA magazine, which after Anatoly Belov left the post of editor-in-chief for one issue was headed by the architect and a frequent guest on the pages of PR Ilya Mukosey, presents a spring issue on the theme “Streets”. Our publication has previously made issues about individual elements of the urban environment (parks, embankments, city blocks), responding to the transformations taking place with them - however, only in Moscow as the main testing ground for urban planning experiments. Now the turn has come to the streets, which since the summer of 2014 have become the object of attention of the capital's authorities, who have established a large-scale and expensive program "My Street", within the framework of which it is planned to improve 3.5 thousand streets at a qualitatively new level.
Its peculiarity, in addition to its scope, is that architectural bureaus, including foreign ones, are actively involved in the process of ennobling and rebuilding the street space. Landscaping suddenly ceased to be an anonymous activity carried out by an unknown person on behalf of the generalized capital's economic complex - tenders began to be held to create street improvement projects, so now we can open a public procurement website and say: this street was made by the architects of KB Strelka, this street was made by Kleinewelt Architekten, and this one is the Megapark company … You don't even need to go to the public procurement website: new implementations and projects receive wide media coverage not only on pro-government Internet portals and TV channels, but also in blogs and fashionable online publications, such as The Village and Billboard Daily who are not alien to the urban agenda.
It should be noted that this increased attention is ensured precisely by the participation of well-known architects and the aforementioned KB Strelka, which won the tender for the creation of a new Standard for the improvement of streets and urban public spaces in the city of Moscow for almost a billion rubles (the amount has not yet been in the head and provoking caustic comments from city planners on social media). In 2016, if everything goes according to plan, landmark projects for the main streets, developed by Strelka with the participation of foreign architectural firms West8, TOPOTEK 1, Snøhetta, VEGA Landskab and others, will be implemented. On the one hand, it will be very interesting to see how these good intentions will turn out for the city and its residents, on the other hand, it is difficult to disagree with the opinion of Ilya Mukosey, who believes that it would be great to transfer at least part of this improvement activity from the center, and so not deprived of attention, to the periphery of the capital, which all these years has remained uncovered.
The concept of the issue and its structure underwent changes several times, but in the end we settled on the previously tested method of comparing Russian (read - capital) practice with foreign ones. The experience of Moscow was subjected to conditional periodization - as the title of the section, Ilya Mukosey suggested the title of Vittorio de Sica's Italian comedy "Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow." In Yesterday we published the long-standing unrealized projects of Wowhaus for the Boulevard Ring and Gehl Architects for the city's main streets. The subsection "Today" includes Myasnitskaya Street with its almost exemplary landscaping according to the project of the "LAARDI" company, made in accordance with the current standard for the "outbound" highways of the Moskomarkhitektura, streets in the area of the Central Children's Store on Lubyanka, the "pilot" projects of which were carried out by KB " Strelka”, and an experimental project of Chernigovskiy lane, which in the summer of 2015 became“white and quiet”through the efforts of the creative association“department * of the environment”.
We also show some new street elements - pedestrian navigation steles and high-tech stops, developed by Billings Jackson Design and City ID by order of the Moscow Department of Transport. In the Tomorrow section, we have placed the aforementioned landmark projects of KB Strelka, developed jointly with leading Russian and foreign bureaus for Tverskaya and Taganskaya streets, Novy Arbat, Bulvarny and Garden rings, the concept of a pedestrian zone around the Polytechnic Museum according to the Wowhaus project, as well as a research the “Walking Streets” project by Urbica Design, which studies and maps street infrastructure.
In addition to objects and projects, the reader is offered an interview with Tatyana Guk, Deputy Head of the Moscow Committee for Architecture and Architecture, who oversees the theme of integrated improvement at the Moscow Space Agency, and Ekaterina Maleeva, Project Manager of Strelka KB, who led the creation of the Standard for the Improvement of Streets and Urban Public Spaces in Moscow.
In the “Foreign Experience” section, we publish interesting examples of the transformation of the street environment in European and US cities - Barcelona, Vienna, Belfast, Slovenian Celje, Seattle and San Francisco. We are talking here about complex reconstruction projects, such as the Belfast Streets Ahead plan, which the AECOM bureau has developed for the central streets of the capital of Northern Ireland (frankly, not the most prosperous city in Europe), as well as targeted and, rather, design interventions, as in San Francisco, where Hood Design, with financial support from Audi, expanded and refurbished the Powell Street pedestrian zone with aluminum outdoor furniture, which features a historic cable car. Special mention should be made of the Bell Street project in Seattle, a street in a densely populated downtown area, criminal and untidy, which, as a result of redevelopment, was made safe, comfortable and attractive - and at the same time, the concept of "shared space" was used, where cars, cyclists and pedestrians move in common traffic. In Vienna, the Dutch Bureau B + B took up the Mariahilfer Strasse trade and were able to overcome the Austrians' love for their cars, making this street part of a pedestrian, part of a "common space", or, as it is called in German-speaking countries, a "meeting area". Samples of various sizes were specially selected for the section: the historical center of the Slovenian town of Celje, the object of the LUZ workshop is very intimate, and the Passage de Sant Joan in Barcelona, reconstructed by Lola Domenech, is one of the widest and busiest streets of this metropolis.
