Alexander Ostrogorsky: We present the interim result of the Ideal City research project, which the bureau
Kleinewelt Architekten, together with colleagues from Habidatum and KB23, with the participation of a group of interns, received after almost two months of collecting and processing information.
Sergey Pereslegin: The Ideal City project (read more about the project in the interview) began as an attempt to imagine a city in which each of us would like to live, work, study, and raise children.
AC: It all started with the idea of an ideal city. It was important for us to start a conversation about what the ideal space for life could be like now.
JV: The idea took shape in a project proposal, which was presented at Arch Moscow.
AC: At the same time, a research project program was announced, the purpose of which would be to get an answer to the question of whether a city can be ideal. We treated this project as an educational one.
And only in an individual, applied order. We wanted to broaden our own horizons. To begin with, we decided to find out what is happening not even in ideal, but in very good cities. We invited student interns to join this work.
JV: And we decided to see what qualities of cities are the most important. The cities for the study were selected taking into account the annual ratings issued by authoritative publications and agencies, in which cities are arranged in a hierarchy according to certain parameters. And the permanent leaders of these ratings are the group of cities whose residents feel the happiest.
AC: We decided to look at four cities from different parts of the world that are most often leading in quality of life ratings: Vienna, Vancouver, Melbourne and Singapore.
JV: The plans of these four cities and their sizes were analyzed. An elementary comparison shows that dimensions are absolutely irrelevant. A city can be large or small in size, and people like it here and there. The next question is: should the city have a clear border? Or can he endlessly produce himself into free space? The border is certainly important. We see this in the example of Vienna, Vancouver and Singapore, with its natural border. Only Melbourne breaks out of this principle.
AC: Melbourne's lack of a natural border is considered the biggest problem in its life in many development strategies of this city. The next question that we assessed is: what kind of natural framework do these cities have?
JV: In the cities under study, the natural framework inside the city is almost absent. There is very little greenery in the city, mostly dense urban development prevails. Throughout its history, each city has individually resolved the issue of green areas using complex development strategies.
AC: Singapore is especially interesting in this regard, which destroyed all the natural environment on the island. In order to compensate for this problem, Singapore invests a lot in unnatural nature, that is, in parks, gardens, sometimes completely futuristic amusement parks. That is, he exchanges real nature for artificial nature.
Vienna, like Moscow, performs a statistical substitution - administratively attaching large green spaces to the city's territory, and thus provides almost 40% of the area of green territories.
JV: Vienna "feeds" on greenery due to its surroundings, turning into the alpine foothills, with almost 100% of the historical urban fabric built up.
AC: Vancouver is like Vienna. It is in a wonderful natural environment. But Melbourne, partly reminiscent of Moscow with its expansion into the Moscow Region, has built up large spaces around it with housing. In the hot Australian climate, this has led to fires being one of the most serious climate threats to Melbourne.
JV: Consider a transport cage.
JV: In Vienna, with its radial road system, the center is clearly distinguished, through which the main street and two Danube embankments, which are used as transport arteries, pass. Moving around the city was not easy until drastic measures were taken - a through highway was built, thanks to which the traffic load on the center was significantly reduced. Moving pedestrians and cyclists around the city center is now more comfortable.
AC: When analyzing the transport network of cities, we investigated not only the traffic management system, but also the issue of the structure of the city's fabric. We know that, for example, in Moscow, two non-optimal systems are superimposed on each other - a radial-circular city center and a large grid of micro-districts, which does not provide the required ratio of road area to city area. Therefore, it was very interesting for us to see how the ideal road network works and how it arises.
Considering our four cases, we identified three basic options. The structure of Vienna is close to radial-annular. Vancouver and Melbourne are cities built in the middle of the 19th century by English and French colonists, so there is a very clear orthogonal grid. Singapore is the third case, based on the splicing of multiple growth points, resulting in a complex structure.
JV: We analyzed the profiles of the widest roads in cities. What immediately attracts attention is that the carriageway is always divided by a green zone, a boulevard, or just a buffer zone.
AC: In all cities, things are pretty decent with the speed of movement and with the public transport system, although everyone uses the latter in different ways. In spite of the recent Moscow discussions that everyone uses public transport in the most comfortable cities, our data does not support this statement. In the cities we analyzed, the level of urban transport use is not very high. Only in Vienna - around 50 percent, and in Vancouver - around 15%, in Melbourne - 11%. Most residents drive cars. The city authorities lament this and regularly prescribe in the strategies the development of plans to increase the percentage of trips by public transport. But so far the situation has not changed. The only exception is Singapore, where public transport carries one and a half times more people per day than lives in the city (7 million passengers versus 5 million inhabitants).
JV: Next, we considered functional zoning schemes.
AC: They are rather approximate, since they were calculated using open sources, primarily, according to the strategies of city development, which we checked with the data obtained by our colleagues from Habidatum. We limited ourselves to large fragments and their dominant functions. Legend: yellow for housing, red and brown for business functions. It can be seen that, regardless of the structure of development, housing and business are mixed. Housing, of course, is always more, but there is no total separation of housing and work anywhere.
JV: The data show that regardless of the city's layout, orthogonal or radically circular road grid, there is still a certain center of attraction, historical, functional, and so on, where people spend their time. Thus, we can conclude that all these cities are monocentric.
AC: More precisely, they have a center of activity, popular in the morning, afternoon and evening, in which attractions, major institutions, business centers, educational institutions, places of entertainment are concentrated, and there are a number of smaller centers.
JV: Our next step was to explore these cities using the example of three typical test sites.
AC: We cut out three squares from the city plan, with sides of 700-800 meters, in the center, on the periphery and exactly between them.
It is quite easy to guess the cities using the example of the central squares. The further from the center, the more difficult it is. Urban development is losing its individuality. Then we analyzed the functional content of the squares.
JV: The results show that the center squares have it all. Perhaps in Vienna there is more housing, and in other cities there is almost no housing left. In the high-rise buildings of Vancouver and Singapore, there is none at all on the ground floors. It is located higher on the upper floors of the towers.
AC: The middle squares show a slightly different picture. Additional functions appear: social infrastructure, cultural objects. In these middle areas, their own centers of attraction are formed. Housing prevails among the functions. Moreover, different cities have different typologies of housing.
JV: Comparing all three test squares in four cities, we made the following conclusions:
- In none of the cities, block development prevails, even where there is an orthogonal grid;
- there is a huge selection of housing. A person can find housing to his liking: even in slums, even in panel five-story buildings, even in skyscrapers, even in townhouses. This diversity is one of the factors that explains why people enjoy living in these cities.
AC: Of the general features, I would also note the same attitude towards private and public space and towards average density, regardless of the nature of the building.
JV: It is important to note that each of these four cities over the past 50 years has had a development strategy that is updated every decade or every 15 years. In these strategies, each of the cities set different goals for itself, critically assessing the current state of the city and the effectiveness of previously adopted strategies. And this constant work on analyzing the path traveled, mistakes made or unsolved problems unites these cities.
For example, Vienna, since the mid-seventies of the last century, has been solving the problem of unhindered movement around the city for cyclists and pedestrians. Light bridges were built across the river and railroad tracks, thanks to which the city can now be crossed without getting off the bike.
JV: And the process continues. We are constantly working on the preparation and implementation of new strategies, master plans, programs.
AC: They do not set themselves any fantastic, idealistic goals. Everything fits into the framework of completely mundane, universal tasks: stopping the growth of the city's territory, increasing the density and efficiency of using the territory, increasing the number of green zones in the urban fabric, and so on.
JV: In parallel with urban planning studies, we conducted a sociological study together with the KB-23 bureau, specializing in urban economics and ecology. Based on the results of this study, we compiled a collective portrait of a resident of our four cities - a user of those spaces and those services that we studied. Marital status, political predilections and the like.
AC: This is not the end of our project. The next stage is to combine the accumulated information and knowledge with our priorities and with the Russian reality. It will take the next few months and, tentatively, in winter, we will present its results.
The Ideal City project continues. Its participants and partners, the bureau Kleinewelt Architekten, KB23, Habidatum, students of specialized universities and specialists from related fields intend to translate the knowledge gained into a practical plane. You can follow the development of the project on the website: kleineweltidealcity.com
