Moscow Agglomeration

The proposal for the Moscow City Agglomeration Development, a plan that includes Moscow city and the Moscow region, considers the role these territories play in the international and national context. The project foresees the influence of expanding populations and work zones on the city’s planning belts and urban areas over time, and thus incorporates a sophisticated network of developed districts and sectors with a progressive approach to nature conservancy. Designed with future development in mind, the first stage of the conceptual proposal is expected to commence within the next 10 years.

The sinuous plan explores intelligent solutions and measures to address Moscow’s serious traffic congestion. The construction of strategic infrastructure balances the distribution of work and residential areas to help reduce commuting times. Boasting 30m² of green space per capita, the future territory of Moscow’s agglomeration guarantees its ecological preservation by ending the destruction of urban areas and preventing unsuitable urban development. The forward-thinking masterplan recovers the principles of the garden city and promotes a zero-carbon, sustainable future for Moscow.

The technological city must be organised as a network, using channels capable of optimising the use of current information technology and forecasting future changes and the speed at which information should circulate and be managed.

The General Plan, an urbanistic trope that fixes a definitive form in time, like a photograph, should be replaced by the Strategic Plan, which seeks to establish a set of guidelines, core concepts, and the main structure of an ‘ideology’. In an era of rapid change, when the limits of many cities will shift over time, the current approach is excessively rigid, hindering flexibility and the successive changes that are required to adapt to transforming lifestyles.

The practice of urban design, which was abandoned last century, should be taken up again so that public space can once again assume a primary importance: the formation of city spaces, streets, plazas, avenues, thoroughfares, joints, views, perspectives, and parks; elements that draw urban spaces together and endow them with continuity by way of buildings and specific architectural objects.

New urban centres should be organised as networks, thereby generating a new polycentric city once a study has been conducted to determine its relationship with present-day Moscow. The spaces that remain between these centres should be treated as natural spaces in order to preserve and enhance the existing ecosystem. Infrastructure, energy supply, and telecommunications should be channelled between the new centres, from which secondary networks can be developed. Each centre should have its own limits in order to avoid ‘suburbanisation’ and to break away from the urban continuum model of the major agglomerations that formed during the 20^th century in most conurbations and metropolitan areas.

In short, city design should contemplate coexistence between different scales:

• The creation of centres and networked communications infrastructure should be considered in relation to the characteristics of present-day Moscow;
• The layout of each new centre should be clear and well defined in order to guarantee the orientation, functionality, and clarity of itineraries, in accordance with the characteristics of Russian urbanism;
• Urban design should be distinctive in each of the new centres; and
• The pedestrian view of the city and its surrounding environment should be taken into account.

Different scales must be planned in line with a twofold methodology—one that moves from the general to the individual view, and from the citizen to the city and its environment.