The spatial development strategy, or master plan, of Suzdal was presented on August 28 by Denis Filippov, deputy general director of DOM. RF, Sergey Sakharov, head of the Suzdal administration, and Grigory Revzin, partner of Strelka KB. It provides for development in two stages. The first is until 2024, when the city will celebrate its millennium. The second stage is calculated until 2030. The implementation of all measures of the strategy is estimated at 23.3 billion rubles, but the list of priority projects will be determined by the federal committee for the celebration of the city's anniversary. The work on the master plan took 8 months, and 40 experts participated in it.
The work, as can be seen from the materials shown, is now at the second stage: a study has been carried out, a master plan has been presented. Ahead is the development of volumetric spatial regulations (ODA), design code and improvement projects for individual territories.
Suzdal today is less than ten thousand local residents and more than a million (1.3 million) guests who come during the year. A city of temple bulbs and kokoshniks, flood meadows with grazing goats, mead and hotels in wooden houses, carved platbands and beautiful ceramics. First of all, they make it the subject of tourists' attention.
four UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Two of them, the church in Kideksha and the Nativity Cathedral, date from the 12th and 13th centuries, respectively. But they are not the only ones that make the city exceptional. Suzdal has preserved many parish temple complexes: 30 churches, 5 monasteries and 14 bell towers, mainly of the 18th century, Empire shopping arcade and quite a lot of residential buildings of the 18th-19th centuries. The preservation of the environment of the historic district town is no less important - post-war Soviet inclusions are small here and are not felt as sharply as in other small towns of Russia.
Suzdal owes much of its safety to both historical circumstances and a large-scale plan of the 1970s - the Golden Ring project, in which it was given the place of a special tourist center, a specific city-museum. A special approach saved Suzdal from overly energetic intrusions, primarily from multi-storey buildings: even typical houses on the outskirts, around the central hospital, in which 60% of the city's population live, here do not exceed three floors and have pitched hip roofs. And since most of the small towns of the Russian Federation are somehow filled with five-storey buildings, then the case of Suzdal is almost unique.
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zooming 1/4 Suzdal. Presentation of the City Spatial Development Strategy until 2030 / 08.2020 Courtesy of: DOM.rf
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zooming 2/4 Suzdal. Presentation of the City Spatial Development Strategy until 2030 / 08.2020 Courtesy of: DOM.rf
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zooming 3/4 Suzdal. Presentation of the City Spatial Development Strategy until 2030 / 08.2020 Courtesy of: DOM.rf
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zooming 4/4 Suzdal. Presentation of the City Spatial Development Strategy until 2030 / 08.2020 Courtesy of: DOM.rf
The authors of the master plan divide the city into three semantic layers: Old Russian, merchant and modern, and offer two groups of approaches: both traditional and, to some extent, new, following modern trends.
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zooming 1/4 The strategy of spatial development of the city of Suzdal until 2030 © DOM.rf, KB Strelka, administration of the city of Suzdal
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zooming 2/4 The strategy of spatial development of the city of Suzdal until 2030 © DOM.rf, KB "Strelka", administration of the city of Suzdal
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zooming 3/4 The strategy of spatial development of the city of Suzdal until 2030 © DOM.rf, KB Strelka, administration of the city of Suzdal
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zooming 4/4 The strategy of spatial development of the city of Suzdal until 2030 © DOM.rf, KB Strelka, administration of the city of Suzdal
The old: restore monuments and preserve the environment
Of course, the proposed master plan is a continuation of a long history of attempts to offer the city a coherent and sustainable strategy for its development as a tourist center. Therefore, it also includes a predictable set of tasks: restoration of churches, replacement of worn-out engineering infrastructure and careful spatial development without radical intervention.
By 2030, it is proposed to restore 22 historical objects of the XII-XVIII centuries, including the Spaso-Evfimiev Monastery, Gostiny Dvor, the bell tower of the Monastery of the Robe. Small updates will affect the central Lenin street.
The building of the current fire station and others currently occupied by administrative institutions are proposed to be reoriented in the project, taking into account the attractiveness for tourists and investments. The historical center of the city, created according to Catherine's plan, with shopping malls in the center, lively and correctly working, will not require major changes, the authors of the document believe.
On the other hand, medical infrastructure and sewerage are 100% worn out; an indicator of the diversity of urban services in a residential, non-tourist area by
urban environment quality index - two out of ten; migration outflow is 4 times more than the average for the Vladimir region, - said in the presentation. Actually, the authors of the project propose to focus on this, everyday, part of the city's life, in addition to monuments.
New: "Tighten up everyday life"
Recently, one of the development goals of Suzdal was to increase the flow of tourists from 1.3 million a year to 2 million. The novelty of the master plan lies in the fact that its authors propose to increase not the number of visitors, but the amount of time and, as a result, the money that a tourist spends in the city.
Indeed, the current trend of our time is the replacement of "bus" tourism with environmental tourism, more thoughtful and individual, the transition from sights from a textbook to immersion in context. Environmental tourism implies immersion, days of walking instead of a "swoop" of several hours, the ability and desire to come to the city and spend more than one day there.
Now the level of everyday life in Suzdal significantly falls short of the level of cultural heritage for which people come here, - the concept developers emphasize. It is this problem that the master plan is designed to solve.
“If you look at the ancient Russian cities of this rank, you will not find an analogue of Suzdal. This is an exceptional Russian city. According to the plan, Suzdal claims to be at the world level, and the UNESCO monuments on its territory are an illustrative history in this sense. Such a city should develop according to the scenario of Bruges or Florence. But outside of the monuments, Suzdal will turn out to be not even a city unit, but a Russian not very rich regional center. In the meantime, there is no need to worry about it.”
We have carefully analyzed the tourist flow: out of a million tourists, almost 70% come for one day and do not stay in the city: came, saw, admired, left. All previous programs for the development of Suzdal suggested: "Let's also invest in the restoration of monuments." Without objecting to this, we set another main task - to raise the level of the city to the level of monuments”.
Sloboda, churches, river
Thus, in addition to supporting the key monuments, the authors propose to revive another cultural and temporal layer - the "suburb", the one that actually makes up the urban fabric of historical Suzdal, so similar to the village in the eyes of a resident of the metropolis who comes here and so different from it. your own daily life. This distinction is interesting and deserves acquaintance no less than the monuments. But today there is practically no reason to look into the "suburb" city. And the environment is not exactly capable of captivating by itself, not everyone is ready to run through the thickets of nettles and motherwort in search of unique knowledge and impressions. You need direction and arrangement, comfort and information. Therefore, the master plan proposes a walking route - an ecological path connecting attractions, parish churches, fragments of historical buildings and the river. You can walk through a good tourist city, just like in Venice, - the authors of the project are convinced. The route will create such permeability, update not the most famous monuments, create new points for tourists to visit.
Another objective of the route is a new scenario for the life of the churches themselves, their religious component. It is problematic to maintain many buildings as only church buildings in our time, since there are not enough parishioners, and a hybrid of the European type: places of tourist and religious pilgrimage itself, according to the developers, can help prevent the degradation of heritage and, in addition, maintain the connectivity of places.
The third well-formulated goal: not to lose the natural-Russian character of the river. The river in Suzdal is small and very beautiful, a boat is now running along it, conceived back in the seventies, so the "Vologda scenario" is definitely to be avoided here: the river needs bank protection, but modern technologies make it possible to implement it according to an easy scenario, without significantly changing the pastoral landscape.
Suzdal design code
The next stage of work will be volumetric-spatial regulations: altitude and other restrictions. Then a design code will appear, the work on which, as was announced at the presentation, is already underway - it will define the aesthetic principles for signs, signs and improve navigation in general, which is important for a city where there are hundreds of thousands of people who do not speak Russian.
The design code, according to the developers, will draw on the city's visual heritage and emphasize its uniqueness. In particular, for the sake of discussing the details of such uniqueness - and in general for interaction with residents and everyone who is interested in live participation, the platform “
What does Suzdal want?”, Where you can take a survey on the visual elements of the environment, leave a complaint, an idea or tell your story about the city. “Signage design code is not a bad idea. But there is no need to unify all the signs in the city. Suzdal is good because it has been a living organism for 1000 years already,”writes one of the residents.
And what about the residents?
One of the objectives of the master plan is to improve the city for the locals. The main projects of modern infrastructure are located in the underdeveloped eastern part of the city with Soviet buildings. In particular, according to the project, it is planned to transfer administrative functions from the city center here.
According to the head of the city administration, Sergei Sakharov, unemployment in Suzdal is minimal - only 0.5%, with 65% of residents working in tourism and other related industries, so the development of infrastructure and routes for residents will be useful. The master plan focuses on education - an opportunity to master modern professions, from catering to modern design, from restoration to the production of souvenirs, to get involved in the economy of your city, to find a market here. A new building of the college and an education center with a school for 1200 places, a center for additional education with 40 classrooms for language and research programs are planned. The activities of the strategy are designed to create another 550 jobs.
The topic of development is touched upon in the master plan rather carefully. The revitalization of Sadovaya Street should lead to the revitalization of the territories around it and the capitalization of the adjacent vacant lots, which are now being sold for almost nothing. In the eastern part of the city, to the south of the existing microdistrict, it is planned to “develop low-rise construction”.
Parking and amphitheater
Among the local activities of the master plan is the streamlining of parking in the center by arranging pockets and creating thousands of new parking spaces at the entrance to the city. There are also plans to improve the conditions for cycling, in particular, 10 km of new bike paths, but they do not focus on them. For Suzdal, bank protection and replacement of 100% worn out engineering infrastructure are more important; one of the accents of the master plan is on them.
One of the few, neat, but at the same time, areas of controversial interventions is an open wooden amphitheater on the banks of the Kamenka River, in one of the most beautiful places in Suzdal, near the Trade Rows.
The authors of the master plan urge not to consider the presented illustrations as design solutions and point out that shore protection in this place is inevitable, and the view amphitheater activates the flow of people, making it possible for additional development for shops in the Trade Rows. The locals, however, are concerned about the view and suggest keeping it intact.
Recall that since 2019, in the area of Trade Rows, the implementation of the Suzdal-Zaryadye-Activation project has been under way, developed by the Rozhdestvenka bureau Narine Tyutcheva at the expense of a private investor and who won a grant of 50 million rubles at the Small Towns competition
2018 year. Some of the solutions voiced in the master plan, in particular, the landscaped path along the ramparts, and the territory outlined in the project, intersect with the master plan. You can learn more about the Rozhdestvenki project here.
From one hundred rubles - seven kopecks
All talk about spatial development always hides money, in the case of Suzdal this is especially important. The city leads the ranking in terms of the number of tourists per capita (162 to one
according to 2018, only Plyos is higher), but practically does not have a budget for the maintenance and development of infrastructure.
Revenues from tourism-oriented businesses account for almost half of Suzdal's gross product. But this almost does not affect the city's budget - only 10% of the tax on income of people employed in tourism falls into it - about 18 million rubles a year, “seven kopecks from a hundred rubles,” according to the head of the administration, Sergei Sakharov.
So one of the main questions that the master plan is trying to answer is how to make the economy of Suzdal sustainable in other ways. Today the average tourist leaves 4.5 thousand rubles in Suzdal. This figure, according to the authors' conviction, can actually be almost doubled after the implementation of the announced projects.
Other major tools for increasing tourism income include: the introduction of a tourist tax, which has been discussed for a long time.
says the head of the city Sergey Sakharov, obtaining the status of the city, increasing the attractiveness of territories for investment and participation in programs. Suzdal has a positive experience: the city received $ 9.5 million from the BRICS New Development Bank, which are aimed at the reconstruction of buildings, improvement of central spaces and water bodies, architectural and artistic lighting.
Overall, the master plan predicts an increase in tourism revenue to 100 million - more than fivefold - by 2030.
Levers and methods
The shown project has already been criticized, in particular by Alexander Antonov, as “an example of development through an event-driven breakthrough,” hoping for an anniversary and not accompanied by a sustainable concept of socio-economic development.
Although, according to Denis Filippov, General Director of the DOM. RF Foundation, "The Strategy offers an exhaustive list of financing mechanisms from budgetary and extrabudgetary funds, and also identifies possible programmatic sources of funding for events." But the complete master plan has not yet been presented to the public - only a presentation, the authors plan to publish the entire draft strategy for the spatial development of Suzdal by the end of 2020.
It should be noted that successful businesses are developing in Suzdal, such as the Pushkarskaya Sloboda Hotel and the Suzdal State Transport Complex by Oleg Zhukov, where a modernist building of the 1970s was recently reconstructed, or the ceramics production, restaurant and farm of Vadim Dymov. There is a non-profit charitable organization "Suzdal Initiative" in the city, which donates books to the museum and which helped residents with food during the pandemic. There are wealthy people in Suzdal who could participate in its transformation. But there are no references to the topic of public-private partnership in the spatial development project.
In general, it must be admitted that the lack of a strong connection between the concepts of spatial development and the tools for their implementation, in fact, remains one of the problems of modern Russian urban studies. A federal program or grant, an anniversary - the means are well-known and understandable, but not that very stable. Perhaps the development of ways of releasing is the topic of a separate study, as they say. Which, however, is not a reason not to plan. In addition, the master plan, one way or another, has chances - the city of Suzdal is very exceptional among other small towns. It remains to hope that funds will be found both for implementation and for managing the process, so that the new anniversary does not cause as fierce controversy as, for example, the millennium of Yaroslavl.
