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19.04.10
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A Profitable Patch
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By Svetlana Kononova
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Moscow’s General Development Plan to 2025, which is likely to be approved by the Moscow City Duma by the end of April, has become the subject of a heated debate. Experts and members of the public have expressed concerns that it could trample on the rights of property owners, lead to a transportation collapse and accelerate the disappearance of historical and architectural heritage from the Russian capital. Yet it is worth noting that this is the first time in Russian history that the urban development of Moscow has been discussed publicly. Does this signal a growing public interest in influencing the urban environment, the city’s economy and the preservation of historical sites?
A recent discussion of the plan in the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation ended with a scandal when chamber member Marat Guelman, an art gallery owner, accused the Moscow authorities of seeking to reap a profit from the city without taking architectural heritage into account. “The historical center of Moscow is valuable for us in itself, but it is like a vegetable patch to be harvested for [the Mayor of Moscow Yuri] Luzhkov,” he said. After this speech, Chief Architect of Moscow Alexander Kuzmin and Speaker of the Moscow City Duma Vladimir Platonov left the meeting.
Although the Public Chamber has apologized for the harsh tone of its criticism, it also released a statement pointing out that “the new General Plan does not propose any solutions to key city problems such as transport, environment, conservation of historical heritage, and the shift to a new, modern and comfortable lifestyle for the citizens. This strategic document does not give any answers to the vital questions that Muscovites and citizens of other regions are asking.”
One big concern relates to the rights of property owners. “According to the Development Plan to 2025, a significant part of built-up areas in the city could be classified as ‘reorganization territories.’ That means it would be possible to forcibly seize real estate and wreck any buildings in the area in order to place new facilities there,” said Edward Trutnev, the director of the Real Property Reform department at the Institute for Urban Economics. “The General Plan contravenes federal laws. Therefore it cannot be approved as it is, and it needs to be revised,” he added.
The General Plan could be approved only if the federal law was changed to allow the Moscow authorities to seize any existing real estate and replace it with new construction for the developers’ benefit, experts at the Institute for Urban Economics believe. However, would Russia be a state ruled by law in this case? Would it protect the rights of property owners?
The second important problem is that the General Plan does not take the Moscow region into account, critics say. “The administrative boundaries of Moscow have been redrawn 11 times in the last 70 years, thereby letting the city grow. However, in 1993 Moscow and the Moscow Region were separated with a fixed border as different administrative units. This decision seems to me like boots on a child’s legs – it leads to incorrigible deformity,” Guelman said.
As a result, the city does not have free space to grow anymore. Land prices are skyrocketing, and developers can only build something new if they wreck existing properties, including historical buildings. There are several possible ways out of this situation, Guelman believes. An agglomeration zone with a 50-kilometer radius could be added to Moscow, or Moscow and the Moscow Region might be united into a single federal district with a 15-million population. “But this is a question of big-time politics,” Guelman said.
Many experts have also criticized the shortcomings of the transportation solutions proposed by the General Plan. Everybody who lives in Moscow knows how much time can be wasted in traffic on a daily basis. Unfortunately, the document does not suggest a clear solution for this problem. Firstly, the proportion of land dedicated to transportation is out-of-date, transportation expert Mikhail Blinkin said. Only 8.7 percent of Moscow’s territory is used for roads and parking. In comparison, in Australia, the United States and Canada, roads and parking lots take up 30 to 35 percent of a city’s total area. In Western Europe they take up 20 to 25 percent, and 10 to 12 percent in modern megalopolises in Asia. However, the Development Plan to 2025 does not suggest any significant increase in road and parking space – possibly because the authors want to reserve more space for profitable new housing and office buildings.
Secondly, the solutions the General Plan does suggest are invariably the most expensive, including building tunnels and clearways without traffic lights. This approach is not very effective, experts believe, and it should be replaced with more modern methods such as transfer parking near metro and railway stations on the city’s periphery, and binary “highway plus street” systems in built-up areas. Moreover, more could be done to encourage developers to invest money in parking space. At the moment many avoid doing so because the procedure for getting building permission is unclear and unhelpfully bureaucratic.
The next area to attract public attention is the situation regarding historical heritage in Moscow. More than 1,500 historic buildings of architectural and cultural value are located in “reorganization territories” according to the Development Plan, and they could be at risk of destruction in the near future. Dozens of historical buildings have disappeared from the Moscow map since the early 1990s, including the famous Hotel Moskva near the Read Square, the Voyentorg military department store, regarded as one of Moscow's best Art Nouveau buildings, Rector House, a unique example of the baroque style, and the manor of Rimsky-Korsakov, a home of Catherine the Great. So the public’s concerns about the Moscow heritage preservation are quite reasonable.
One more point of contention in the General Plan is the safety aspect. “The document does not include a ‘security’ charter it all. But it is absolutely necessary for a city with a multi-million population, especially taking into account the recent terrorist attacks,” Guelman said. The traditional school of urbanism in Russia does not put security in the hands of city planners, but the new reality demands that this out-of-date approach be revised.
The environmental aspect of Moscow’s development to 2025 is also controversial. The forest and park “natural reserves” might be destroyed because a significant part of these areas would be given up for construction to investors from Moscow and the Moscow Region.
Despite the fact that experts and the public have asked for the document to be revised, the third reading of the proposed General Plan of Moscow Development to 2025 will take place on April 21 in the Moscow City Duma. |
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