The impact of the settlement system of Russia on its economy was the topic of a seminar held on November 15 at the initiative of the Research Center "Neokonomika" and with the support of JSB "Ostozhenka" and ITP "Urbanika". Economist Oleg Grigoriev, architectural historian Dmitry Fesenko, urban planner Maxim Perov and architect Kirill Gladky made speeches. ***
The spatial structure of our country is a topic that seems to be important (hardly anyone will dare to say otherwise), but now it is, in fact, on the periphery of public attention. They remember about resettlement only when any resonant emergency occurs, as, for example, in the case of Pikalevo, when everyone learned about the problems of single-industry towns, or Krymsk, when it suddenly turned out that there are hundreds of settlements in the flooding zone. But as soon as the fire can be extinguished, the topic falls into suspended animation - until the next major disaster.
The settlement system of Russia is, to a very large extent, the legacy of a now defunct country, the USSR. Many cities owe their origin to industrialization, which peaked in the middle of the twentieth century. However, the super-fast, forced industrial development had a downside - the so-called "false urbanization": hundreds of new cities built to serve industrial facilities did not become real, real cities, but remained factory settlements, sometimes of hypertrophied sizes. For well-known reasons, full-fledged urban communities have never been formed in them (note: VL Glazychev wrote a lot about this in detail. See, for example, "Slobodization of the Gardariki Country").
Simultaneously with the accelerated growth of the urban population, there was an exsanguination of the countryside, both economically and culturally. In addition, the industrial era turned out to be immortal - its decline began already in the 1960s, and although the economic autarky of the Soviet Union delayed the end, it was unable to prevent it. By the beginning of the 1990s, the picture of a deep urban crisis in Russia was clearly evident. Industrial and small cities (especially single-industry ones) turned out to be not only unclaimed in the new economic conditions, but, in fact, deprived of the opportunity to adapt to them. The building of the Soviet empire was held hostage not only by millions of people, but also by the entire system of territorial structure, which cannot be limited only to large cities that are more resistant to changing economic structures.
The problem of an organism, many parts of which are in a coma, must be solved, but how? For 25 years, this question has not received the slightest intelligible answer. The task is complex, complex, requiring the joint work of many specialists in different fields. At the same time, the prevailing policy of neoliberalism in Russia (and most of the world) does not in any way contribute to the search for solutions. Caring for the spatial structure and development is a function of the state by definition, whereas after the collapse of the USSR, it demonstrates completely different priorities. In these circumstances, the role of the first violin in the discussion of models for overcoming the crisis and further actions is given to economists, moreover, of the liberal-monetarist sense. The only idea presented to society by the authorities is to concentrate resources in 10-20 large centers and "agglomerate" them so that they can become counter-magnets - counterweights, that is, an attractive alternative to Moscow and St. Petersburg (note: this concept was again voiced at the recent All-Russian Civil Forum in the discussion of S. Sobyanin and A. Kudrin). The rest of the models, if discussed, then, as a rule, in much more highly specialized audiences.
It can be considered a coincidence (or perhaps a regularity) that the initiators of the cycle of educational seminars on the spatial structure of Russia were precisely the economists - the employees of the Research Center "Neokonomika", as well as architects from JSB "Ostozhenka" and ITP "Urbanika". Accordingly, the theme of the first meeting, moderated by economist Alexander Sharygin, employee of the Research Center "Neo-Economics", was the economic aspect of resettlement - more precisely, the impact of the spatial structure of the country on its economic development. The purpose of this and subsequent activities is to maximize the clarification of various professional positions in relation to the situation with the settlement system and, if possible, search for ways to resolve the problems. In addition to the inviting party, presented by the head of the center Oleg Grigoriev, the guests presented their reports: the town planner Maxim Perov, the architectural historian Dmitry Fesenko and the architect Kirill Gladky. Despite the different professional backgrounds of the participants, many positions coincided.
Oleg Grigoriev: Russia needs global cities
Oleg Grigoriev turned out to be the most pessimist of all the participants. In his opinion, the economic situation in Russia is worse than we think. In contrast to the complacent official point of view, according to which our country is a developed country experiencing some difficulties in the transition to a post-industrial society, Russia is in reality a developing country that is located on the periphery of the world system of division of labor. Due to this fact, the choice of possible models of its development narrows to three, each of which involves interaction with developed countries: monocultural - raw materials), rent: existence on income from the transit of international commodity flows, and investment: providing world commodity producers with cheap labor. None of them are attractive, dooming the existing settlement system to further degradation. Staying on the economic periphery of the world divides Russian territories into so-called “local reproduction contours” - territories leading a closed economy close to natural, with a low level of division of labor and cooperation, and “hospices” (V. Glazychev's metaphor - territories where when -that was an active economic activity, but now it has either stopped altogether, or is maintained in a half-dead state).
According to Grigoriev, our country no longer has any other paths for economic growth, except for the creation of clusters competitive in the world market and changes in the settlement structure. As one of the solutions to the problem, Grigoriev proposes the construction of a city with a population of 3-5 million, which could become a stimulus for economic growth, as well as a chance for Russia to integrate into the world system of division of labor. The size of 3-5 million is obtained from the analysis of the settlement system based on the known.
Zipf's rules. This pattern, also known as the rank-size rule, assumes that the population of each city within real, non-administrative boundaries tends to be equal (not less) to the population of the largest in the country, divided by the ordinal number of that city in the ranked series. That is, ideally, the population of the second largest city in the country should be half the size of the largest, the third - three times, and so on. If we apply this rule to Russia, we will find the following. After the collapse of the USSR, a colossal demographic gap was formed between the capitals and the largest millionaires (although, in fact, there is a gap between the metropolitan agglomerations themselves). In other words, with a population of 18-20 million in Greater Moscow and a population of 6 million in St. Petersburg, we lack a population of 9-10 million, while the city following St. Novosibirsk and Yekaterinburg are far from these sizes).
Maxim Perov: trends need to be regulated
Urban planner Maxim Perov, deputy director of the Urbanika ITP, defined the settlement system as a spatial expression of the civilization process. The economy is only one of the three main factors of its formation, along with social - the creation of town-planning prerequisites for the development of society, and ecological - the survival of man as a biological species. Settlement has a lot in common with biological systems: it is characterized by such properties as inertia - the desire to preserve the elements of the structure, stability - resistance to global or revolutionary changes and "subjectivity" - the presence of an internal mechanism of development. However, the spatial structure “mutates” under the influence of “tectonic” factors, such as stages of development of society, changes in technological structures and economic models. This is what the current trends in the Russian settlement system are connected with: the massive, albeit not total, decline of small and single-industry cities that have lost their jobs, the overflow of the economically active population to large cities - where there is work, the overload of their infrastructures due to these migrations, and so on. Further. According to Perov, these trends are stable and are unlikely to change in the foreseeable future. Therefore, the task today is not to change them, but to search for opportunities for regulation, which, among other things, requires large-scale studies of both the Russian situation and international experience.
Dmitry Fesenko: integrative megaprojects to replace point projects
Dmitry Fesenko, editor-in-chief of the Architectural Bulletin magazine, spoke about the imbalance in the Russian settlement system. This estimate is also based on Zipf's rule, according to which we have a failure not only in the cohort of the largest cities, but also in small ones: over the past 25 years, about 25 thousand settlements of various sizes have ceased to exist, and about 10 thousand more have lost their infrastructure. Perhaps the mass extinction of small towns and villages is an even more dangerous symptom. If we compare the settlement system with the circulatory system, then we actually observe the necrosis of the capillary network, the exsanguination of vast territories, both not very favorable for living (the location of industry in Soviet times did not take into account the climate too much), and historically inhabited, like the Tver or Pskov regions.
In these conditions, the prevailing doctrine of "controlled contraction" and "polarized growth", that is, the bet on large cities to the detriment of the rest, "unpromising" settlements - should be revised in favor of strengthening the historically established framework of settlement, the development of a network of medium and small cities and settlements … This is a necessary condition for the country's survival. It is clear that the prerogative of solving this problem belongs to the state, since no one else is able to lift this load in principle, which should switch from dispersed type megaprojects affecting local territories with the expectation of a further ripple effect (APEC, Sochi-2014, World Cup-2018) to integrative megaprojects (like Transsib or Roosevelt's New Deal).
Kirill Gladky: architect in spatial planning
In contrast to the predominantly theoretical considerations of the previous participants of the seminar, the speech of Kirill Gladky, the chief architect of the projects of JSB "Ostozhenka", was devoted to more practical matters - strategies for spatial development of territories, their goals, principles, algorithms, results, assessments of the effectiveness of implementation, the benefit in this area the team has accumulated significant and varied experience. The settlement system can be a design object with a different "focal length" (S - quarter, M - microdistrict, L - small town or area of a large city, XL - large city, XXL - agglomeration, etc.). The bureau's portfolio includes an impressive list of urban development projects covering most of the taxonomic planning chain: from S - a group of blocks (Ostozhenka microdistrict, “conflict-free reconstruction strategy” in Samara) to XL - a large city (Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, Irkutsk). By the way, many of them (for example, Kirovsk-2042) were developed jointly with the Urbanika ITP, which was represented at the seminar by Maxim Perov. Ostozhenka's interest in urban planning is not accidental - in fact, the bureau's activities began with him, not to mention the fact that its head Alexander Skokan was a member of the NER group, which in the 1960s developed a utopian (or visionary - depending on the point of view) the project of the settlement system on the scale of the USSR.
It so happened that, from a substantive point of view, Kirill Gladky's speech was somewhat different from the other three: if the economist, geographer and architectural historian talked about the settlement system as a whole, then the architect talked about its individual elements on a much more local scale. On the one hand, this can be explained by the fact that urban planning as a type of activity has its own boundaries, overcoming which the tasks become much more complicated. On the other hand, the modern Russian planning practice is limited by the agglomeration horizon, although funds are also rarely sought for serious projects on this scale, while the levels of the local and even more so the national settlement system are already beyond the understanding of potential customers for such works. Lack of demand in this area means lack of supply. This has already led to the fact that the topic of resettlement has long flowed from a practical plane to a theoretical one. Instead of putting their competence into practice to solve known problems, professionals, with rare happy exceptions, are forced to be content with detached observation of the course of natural processes. However, a theory without practice cannot exist for a long time - it is emasculated and degraded.
Resettlement is by definition an interdisciplinary topic, which, due to its breadth, does not fit into the framework of one profession. True, we have very few examples of real interdisciplinarity - there is no effective demand for it. As a result, speakers of a particular field of knowledge begin to speak in different languages, less and less understandable to each other and even less - to a wide audience. From this point of view, the November seminar was a successful attempt not only to present professional positions, but also to find the necessary conceptual "interfaces".
