Natalia Sidorova
architect, co-founder of DNA AG
“The impact of this grandiose program will affect every citizen - since it is planned to significantly increase the density of the development of these territories in comparison with the existing ones, and, consequently, to increase the population in the city. Will such a consolidation benefit the city? This is the subject of a separate study, which must be done before starting the implementation of this program. I can share my own experience - we were participants in the first wave of demolition of five-story buildings. My grandmother had an apartment in a five-story building of the very first series in Beskudnikovo. Nice two-room "vest". Three apartments per floor. At the entrance, all the neighbors were familiar. The trees are taller than the houses, so the houses opposite were not visible, you live like in a park. The only drawback of the house itself was poor soundproofing and there was no lift. In 2008, under the demolition program, we moved to a new house across the street - brick-monolithic, 25-storey, with a large kitchen and a loggia. Of course, the apartment itself has become better, but the environment has changed at the same time - the privacy of housing has disappeared: many tenants in one entrance, where no one knows anyone, a lot of cars, and all around are the same typical houses, only of a different number of storeys, plus a new house we were no longer connected by any history, it had to be settled anew. And we could not live there, as in other matters, almost all our neighbors in the five-story building, took the opportunity to move to another place.
It is unlikely that we are talking about the complete abolition of existing SNIPs and norms. Since standards are primarily about ensuring safety, responsibility and acceptance criteria. Rather, we can talk about the adjustment of urban planning regulations. At one time, when in 2012 we won the competition for the residential quarter of the Skolkovo innovation center, we were also first told that we design at our own discretion, without taking into account the norms, that for this territory all the usual standards will be canceled and new progressive ones will be developed. But when it came to real design, nothing was canceled, they were designing as usual. And the quality of the environment does not so much depend on the norms as on the will and desire of all participants in the process to create this high-quality environment, and not just get square meters. And from the policy of the city authorities, aimed at the interests of the city's life, and from the interest of the developer, and from the professionalism of the entire team of designers and builders, and further from the residents themselves.
With the existing plans for the renovation of territories, the role of a single urban developer will dominate. Developers who are not involved in this process will find it difficult to compete with it. In this case, the danger of making standard, average decisions when creating housing and living environment is very high. In my opinion, it is important to develop a mechanism to achieve a quality standard that takes into account the diversity and individuality of the living environment, types of housing and its density, the appearance of buildings, landscaping, including taking into account the characteristics of each district in the city."
Nikita Tokarev
Director of the Architectural School MARCH
“Transformations of this magnitude are rare, but occur in the history of mankind. Including in the developed cities, involving large-scale demolition. In terms of the volume, which is supposed, this project is on the level of the largest urban development projects in the history of Europe. So far, we know almost nothing other than the number of people that may be affected. It is also gigantic - about ten percent of Moscow residents. I think that in terms of area it will be a huge part of the city, which is actually supposed to be rebuilt. This is similar to the restoration of the cities of the USSR and Europe after the war, only there is no war here - here the city authorities themselves are going to act as a bulldozer and a builder.
An undertaking of this magnitude involves a project or a vision of the future. Haussmann, having demolished medieval Paris, built a new city, in which the metro appeared, multi-storey housing, apartment buildings appeared, Paris boulevards appeared - this is a completely new model of the city. Stalin's general plan also envisioned a vision of the great, shining future of the communist, for the sake of which much had to be demolished. In part, this program has been implemented: new avenues, the Garden Ring, Tverskaya, and a new typology of development have appeared. Today, oddly enough, we see absolutely nothing - not a single intelligible proposal regarding this very future, for what is the giant demolition planned?
I can’t remember a single project that didn’t see the future so much. Even the program for the construction of five-story buildings assumed a new way of life, new separate housing instead of communal apartments, a completely new model of life, which was promoted through the media, through the cinema. The structure of the microdistrict with a school and a kindergarten in the middle was being developed.
Architecture, urban planning - it inevitably works with the future. If this program is designed for 20 or 25 years, I don’t remember the exact numbers, the city should have changed dramatically by that time. Seeing all the trends in the development of cities, we can assume that then we will live in a completely different city, about which now there is neither a rumor, nor a spirit, and not the slightest attempt to imagine it. In this sense, the renovation program is unique. It is a program without a program. A program without a project.
In fact, in the twenty-five post-perestroika years we still live in the typology of "odnushka", "kopeck piece", "treshka" - no new mass housing has developed.
The second aspect of the problem is a sharp increase in building density and the number of inhabitants. But about this, and already Revzin managed to write that if one and a half million live now, then potentially four and a half million will live in the same territories. It is not known where these people will come from. Is Moscow growing at this rate? Are they ready to buy all this housing? New Moscow, for example, is selling poorly or not at all. And most importantly, what will happen to the city, in which about three million more new residents will appear, where schools, kindergartens, clinics, shops, and parking lots will appear for them. This is not a question of planning a particular territory. This is a question of the whole city in general, of the general plan that has just been adopted. In fact, it is now necessary to start developing a new master plan, or to update the old one again. Until this has been done, it is not even clear how this will affect the city as a whole: the loading of the subway, public transport, and so on … will there be enough water and electricity for people to serve new houses. Let's imagine that there are four or three times more apartments, each of which has an electric stove and the apartment consumes roughly ten kilowatts of electricity, and the current apartment consumes 2 kilowatts, "odnushka" in "Khrushchev". I have not even heard of any preparation for the study of this topic."
Nikolay Lyzlov
architect
“Breaking down houses is an exceptional thing. Homes are the foundation of the urban atmosphere. The whole city consists of hard and soft, here the last one is the urban atmosphere itself, the urban environment, and it clings to buildings. I had the good fortune to live in an area that will undergo the most massive restructuring - Northern Izmailovo, our house was surrounded by total demolition. You see, the city is not only your private apartment, your staircase and your yard. It is also everything that is around, it is everything - the city. It is necessary to strive to ensure that a person perceives everything that surrounds him as a continuation of his own apartment. So that he treats the street, the square, the yard as well as his bedroom, dining room and kitchen. It would never occur to anyone to litter or paint on the walls in their own home, you know, you need to do this so that this feeling of your own space spreads to the city. But this program will destroy it all.
Everyone will be in a different situation - better or worse. As it was before - they came to the commission that dealt with the demolition, and the first thing they did was ask the question: for what? Because we want to build something there. - What do you want to build there? At the same time, it was assumed that we are talking about an already ruined building, in which no one has lived for a long time, that all issues of ownership have already been resolved, that this house is not only not a monument, but also of no value at all - this is the first half of the discussion. And the second - that at this place we are going to do this and that and this will not violate anyone's rights, it will comply with all the rules and regulations, landscape-visual analysis. Then, in fact, the demolition was allowed. There is a certain order, and it is correct, the city is a rather complicated thing, scrupulously accurate.
Each house must be considered separately. Repairing is in any case cheaper than breaking and building again. Houses have been standing for hundreds of years. Everything can be restored. There is no impossibility. This is also a manipulation of public opinion, and there are examples in Moscow itself of overbuilt, renovated five-story buildings, which are much more convincing than statements about complete disrepair. If you follow everything. The condition of the networks is one thing, the state of the supporting structures is another”.
Evgeny Ass, rector of the architectural school "MARSH"
“In this whole story, I am concerned about two plots that go beyond the framework of architecture in a certain sense. It is a city transformation mechanism and a decision-making mechanism. How does a city change at all? Well, it would seem that there is a master plan for the development of Moscow until 2025 approved by the Moscow City Duma in 2010. Suddenly, in 2012, a piece of equal area is cut to Moscow, which is not written in this general plan at all. I may or may not like this master plan a thousand times, but it does not include the annexation of a new Moscow and no projects of total renovation.
It's like being offered plastic surgery for free. In general, you feel pretty good anyway, but they say to you: “No, that's it, now with long noses it just doesn't work. Now there is a general shortening of the noses. Muscovites should have short noses. And what to do with it now? Who benefits from this besides cosmetic surgeons?
It seems to me that this is the first question here - how does the natural development of the city take place? References to Baron Haussmann do not convince me, because in general there were not many such examples in history. Only in totalitarian states, to which, in a sense, France of that time can be attributed, and there, I don’t know, Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler, who took such decisive actions in relation to the cities, adapting them for their political goals. And even then Osman spent six years punching his project.
It seems to me that a city is generally a piece of jewelry, it is an object of jewelry work. It is impossible to process cities with an ax, for example, to process cities, cities are processed with a thin scalpel, and this is generally such jewelry, small work - this house should be moved, this one a little bit, this one a little bit here, here you can build on it, add here. And like this, something like that, little by little, this is how cities add up, and then they have some kind of natural growth. Everything that we love in cities has been done for centuries - only then they become somehow full-fledged, like living organisms, like a tree, like a bush, like, I don't know, some kind of reservoir in which some kind of a life.
And the problem of dilapidation, in fact, is also very interesting. If you think about it, the houses built in the 17th century in Amsterdam are wildly inconvenient by today's standards, should have been demolished long ago, but for some reason people live and rejoice in them, and they are repaired every year, and the roofs are patched up and the walls correct and fix the overlap.
They say that some famous architects often appear on TV, who somehow propagandize that: "Yes, there will be beauty, let's put things in order there." Now for architects, a field of large orders may indeed appear. I am also for the beauty and improvement of the city, but not by order, but thoughtfully and gradually. And I am glad that the Union has some ethical considerations. It seems to me that this is a very good symptom - it means there are architects who stand up for the rights of residents, and not predatory developers or political intrigues of the authorities."
Olga Aleksakova
architect, founder of Buromoscow
“Nobody cancels all the norms. Urban planning norms need to be revised, this is a huge amount of work being done by Strelka, the Moscow Spacecraft, and the Research and Development Institute of the General Plan. According to the existing norms, only a model of a microdistrict can be assembled, and there should be more opportunities.
Ideally, the quality of the living environment is guaranteed with one spatial city development strategy with zoning and density / height restrictions for each district. And high-quality projects made by teams of specialists: urban planners, transport workers, economists, sociologists, ecologists. There are no mechanisms for organizing either one or the other yet, but they are being developed.
There are different models of land ownership. The ownership of the adjacent territory is associated with the typology of development: quarterly or microdistrict. The infrastructure must belong to the city, the city is responsible for its condition. The yard can be a private territory, but then its maintenance is a burden on the residents, this is an ambiguous situation."
recorded by Nastya Kolchina
architect
