Russia plans to build 600 million m by 20252 housing. In 2015, 85 million m were built2, in 2016 - 79 million m2… It is planned to reach the mark of 100 million m2 in year. The citizens are promised a comfortable living environment. One hundred million square meters is a lot, so it will have to be built quickly. If we do not take action now, the country will be covered by another wave of panel thirty-storey microdistricts, which are outdated economically and aesthetically and which, moreover, will have to be demolished in 20-30 years, as they are now demolishing Khrushchevs.
an example of a typical development near Moscow, however, there are a lot of them:
Therefore, Strelka, together with DOM. RF, is developing the Principles for the Integrated Development of Territories. This is a document for the transition to modern development models.
A total of seven books are planned. The first - the Code of Principles for the Integrated Development of Territories - is fundamental in nature, describes goals and values, taking into account international experience and the specifics of Russia, then comes the specifics. The second book is devoted to the development of built-up areas, the third to the development of free territories, the fourth to the formation of the image of the city, the fifth to a guide to project development, the sixth to a guide to project implementation, and the seventh to the development of the urban environment in single-industry towns.
The set of principles was tested with the help of professional architects at the DOM. RF competition. Participants presented their designs for low-rise, mid-rise and central housing models. The results will be announced on May 18 at the forum “
Environment for life in Kaliningrad, which is held by the Ministry of Construction and Housing and Utilities of the Russian Federation, the Strelka Institute and the administration of the Kaliningrad region.
Examples of finalist projects for low-rise (new name: suburban) and mid-rise (urban) development models.
Defeat the hated SNIPs
The introduction says that the document is now being discussed with the professional community and relevant departments. It is also said about the preparation of a comprehensive proposal for updating the legal framework governing the development of residential and multifunctional development areas and the improvement of public spaces. It is important. Most of the standards or SNIPs were written 60 years ago for Soviet micro-districts, and now they are morally outdated. For architecturally interesting housing, it is now necessary to produce special technical conditions that require financial costs, for which customers are not ready. If Strelka defeats SNIPs and moves this colossus, it will be a historic achievement.
What is a compact city
The first part of the book is called “Quality of the Urban Environment,” and it says the main thing: diversity is the basis of the resilience of cities. The most important chapter of the Code of Principles is called “The Compact Environment of a Resilient City”.
I would like to think that it captures the historical moment of lifting the curse of panel micro-districts, which were abandoned in Europe and America back in the 1970s, and now there is a chance that they will be abandoned in Russia.
A compact city is a building no higher than seven floors, the first floors are given for public functions; housing, work, culture, entertainment are mixed within the same block, and all functions are within walking distance, which reduces the need for cars; the unit becomes not a microdistrict of 60 hectares, bounded by wide roads, but smaller blocks of 0.6-5 hectares, delimited by normal streets 20-40 m wide (in general, the criterion of the normality of a street and its scale to a person, given in the book of Alan Jacobs , - when, being on one side of the street, you can discern the face of a person walking on the other side - approx. LK). The front of the facades and the front of the parking lot with a denser grid of streets increase several times. Streets of a viable city should make up no less than 30% of the territory (in Russia today it is much smaller), their length should be 18 km per 1 sq. Km of territory. In fact, the description of the compact city corresponds to the structure of historical buildings such as the center of St. Petersburg or Rome, although the style of architecture is not prescribed.
A resilient city can withstand crises
The starting point was the following circumstance: not so long ago, the international organizations OECD and Habitat at the UN, dealing with housing, formulated the characteristics of a sustainable and competitive city. In Russian cities and towns, only historical buildings correspond to them, which is only 8%.
A few comments on the definition of a resilient city. Previously, there was no such definition, there was only sustainability in the sense of sustainability. There is a problem with it in general in Russian: it is translated as eco-sustainability, but this brings confusion. Resistant to anything - to frost, to stress - it is frost-resistant or stress-resistant. Sustainable is environmentally sustainable, the opposite in meaning. Resilient - still sounds better. A resilient city is a city that can withstand economic and social crises. Resilient cities must create new models for territorial development.
Urban environment of Russia
According to the Code of Principles, there are three types of environment in Russia: individual residential buildings (IZHS), microdistricts and historical.
As already mentioned, only the historical environment corresponds to the principles of a compact viable city, but in our country it is only 8%. “The microdistrict environment is monotonous and monotonous. This includes 77% of the housing stock in Russia”(p. 25). The share of open spaces (read, wastelands) in this environment is 70% - that is, it is very uncomfortable and unpleasant to walk in it, the share of commercial infrastructure is 10-12% - that is, it is very low and not comfortable for people. Another common type of environment in Russia, especially in the South, is IZhS. Its disadvantages are due to the low population density and sparse buildings, little functional diversity, expensive roads and communications. In compact cities of Europe and the USA with a high, more than 15 thousand people / m22, the density of the commercial infrastructure is 20%.
The Principles provide interesting historical insights. In particular, it is mentioned that during the reign of Catherine the Great, the centers of 416 cities out of 497 existing ones were planned and built up along the red lines with exemplary buildings. This building has survived in cities such as: Belgorod, Veliky Novgorod, Kashin, Vyatka, Kaluga, Irkutsk, Tyumen, Saratov, etc. The classic quarters were built on approximately the same principles until 1955. Therefore, the historical building is understood as pre-revolutionary plus Stalinist.
This is 2% of the territories and 6%, respectively. It is she who is compact in terms of the ratio of the building area and the territory. The share of commercial infrastructure there reaches 40%. It ended when Khrushchev announced the fight against architectural excesses in 1955. The microdistricts that were then built are regulated by the 1958 law "Rules and Norms for the Planning and Development of Cities".
New models of the urban environment
Before proposing new housing models, Strelka experts analyzed 100 successful examples of integrated development of territories, 40 thousand blocks in Russia (in those cities where new construction was 50%), 450 houses, conducted 120 in-depth interviews, reviewed 1800 texts on social networks on based on digital anthropology and 80 objects in terms of the structure of the cost of construction.
In the third part "New models of the urban environment" scenarios of urban life are analyzed. There are three main scenarios, like the models: suburban, urban and central. Each scenario has components related to the use of urban space: housing, travel, consumption and leisure.
Western experience is detailed in figures, which everyone can compare with their own. For Europe and the United States, households are usually divided as follows. More people under 40 live in the center, the composition of the population is diverse, from students to wealthy people, the rental market is larger (in Germany it is generally 70%). In the suburbs, as a rule, in private houses, the population over 40 lives with children. The number of adults per household is approximately one and a half people. It is clear that residents of the center use public transport more often than residents of suburbs, but, surprisingly, both of them are not enough. (In Spain the share of public transport is from 2 to 4%, in Switzerland 15-19%).
A similar situation is developing in the cities of Russia: the conventional knights of the Central Administrative District have less transport movements, but more and more varied leisure and consumption than the Zamkadysh. That is why Strelka has developed three housing models: 1)
suburban; 2) city and 3) central. Archi.ru wrote about them in connection with the DOM. RF competition, I will not dwell on them in detail here. Key performance indicators are displayed for each. For example, the share of commercial infrastructure in the low-rise model is 5%, in the mid-rise model - 20%, and in the central one - 40%. Only a place of work 10 minutes away by transport seems to me to be a utopian indicator of an urban model. This is almost always more. In general, this model is the most flexible, as it provides for the change of function from residential to commercial.
Role of cities
75 percent of Russia's population lives in cities. Cities define the economy of Russia and the world as a whole. The main share of GDP is created in cities. The new models proposed by Strelka should improve the lives of a large number of people. Citizens who pay income tax contribute 25% of the funds to the city budget, so post-industrial cities need citizens. And so that people do not leave, it is necessary to create a comfortable environment for them.
The density of a viable city must be at least 15 thousand people per 1 km2… (The most expensive areas of London, for example Chelsea or South Kensington, have a high density with low buildings - approx. L. K.). This keeps the city from sprawling. A compact urban environment implies an increase in the built-up spot. The density is the same for a block and a tower, but a block up to 7 floors is proportionate to a person, it feels good to them. I must say that similar phrases of an emotional nature are found in the Principles - thanks to Strelka for this. There, for example, it is written that in the Soviet microdistrict, the typical type of buildings did not allow one to become attached to a dwelling (it's true!). But the Principles do not regulate the detailing of facades, and an environment that is commensurate with a person can be combined with very monotonous facades (perhaps, recommendations will appear in the next books).
As a fan of the historic city, I am very glad that, in the opinion of international experts, it was he who turned out to be the most sustainable, ecological and economically viable. And that new housing models are largely following it. I have long cherished the idea that traditional architecture, kicked out of education, will return from the back door, through urbanism. But there remains a question to which I still cannot get a clear answer. Smaller quarters of 2-4 hectares in new models, dense low-rise buildings, a frequent grid of streets, the setting of houses along the red line of streets is a wonderful environment. Even the number of windows and the length of the facades are partly regulated by the new Principles. The new Principles make it possible to use the land more intensively. But still, how to convince the developer to use exactly these Principles, and not do everything the old fashioned way - a microdistrict of 25-storey plates and towers with voids between them? Indeed, with a denser building, the costs of laying communications increase (usually, this explains the architects' disagreement with the developer to build seven-storey quarters). As far as I understand, with narrower roads, sanitary breaks are not needed, and additional territories are freed up. The front of the parking lot is lengthened with a more frequent grid of streets, the front of the facades with public ground floors is also increasing. But whether this is directly related to the benefit for the developer is not clear to me personally. Obviously, it is possible to limit the developer in terms of height only by registering it in SNIPs (see below the expert's comment).
Returning to the city of streets and small neighborhoods, where open spaces are filled with people and everything can be reached on foot, not only creates a more comfortable environment, but also automatically increases social control. There is no crime on the streets where there are people. Small businesses flourish on the streets where people walk (for which the Corbusian-style sleeping areas are very poorly suited).
Predecessors
The Code of Principles contains a historical background on urban planning ideas that preceded the Strelka models. This is New Urbanism in the West and the environmental approach in Russia. This is important because the authors of the urban boom of the last 10 years (which means the improvement of Moscow, interest in neighborhoods, classic cities) - usually do not rely on their predecessors or do not report it. The new urbanism was a reaction to the sprawl of single-story suburbs in the United States and panel areas in Europe. By the way, the document on which the new urbanists were based was also called "Principles" (Awanhee Principles, authors A. Duany and E. Plate-Sieberk, 1978). The new urbanism, more than the Strelka models, is focused on the layout of a traditional village with a central square in the center, as well as on traditional local construction from local materials with the involvement of local workers. The arrow does not regulate the style and does not rely on local traditions. Otherwise, the similarity is great: mixed use, pedestrian accessibility, a humane ratio of the width of streets and the height of facades, etc. The closest thing to New Urbanism is the low-rise model proposed by Strelka and tested in the DOM. RF competition. The environmental approach, which flourished in the 1980s, inheriting the ideas of Alexei Gutnov, was more concerned with co-scale construction in the historical environment. Strelka has not yet commented on this topic. ***
Next, we talk with Ekaterina Maleeva, Project Director of KB Strelka
Archi.ru:
- From the high stands, intentions have been declared to increase the volume of housing construction in the near future to 100 million m2 in year. How to avoid panel areas at such a pace of construction, because their construction is still the fastest?
- The Principles contain a set of solutions from which a variety of projects can be assembled. The details themselves are already of high quality: high-quality layout of apartments, high-quality buildings, high-quality principles of the layout of buildings in the neighborhoods. You can type any solution you want from already well-made parts. This is why the end result will be good.
Now each new project starts from scratch, or the developers use their own base of already developed solutions, and the plans are copied from project to project. And here there will be a book, where there will be many different solutions - not one developer came up with, but a whole collection, different experiences and different elements. This will make it easier for planners and developers alike. If they were told: here, new principles, build on them, it would be difficult, but here there is already a set of details, and it is immediately clear what to do with it.
And in order to make implementation easier, we hold Competitions (for example, an Open International Competition for the Development of Standard Housing and Residential Development), and we also do pilot projects, such as in Saratov, Kaliningrad or Vladivostok.
Why was the document describing new city models previously called Standards, and now called Principles?
- Now there is no such form of document in the legislative system - a flexible standard. Now standards are SNiPs and GOSTs, and until the legislation is changed, these will be principles.
How do the new models fit into the built-up areas, in particular, how do they relate to the historical buildings?
- Built-up areas can be adjusted to the quality of the models. There are different spatial solutions that bring the existing environment closer to the ideal that we have formed for ourselves on the basis of the existing problems of residential development in Russia. It is clear that the reference environment will not work, but you can get closer to it. For example, laying new streets, forming a building front, working with the first floors: with residential (adding front gardens) and non-residential (adding shopping facilities), planting trees as noise protection, all sorts of rainwater drainage devices, introducing a design code on fences and signs … In general, there are a lot of solutions.
