From the editor

OZ planned to publish an issue dedicated to the city three years ago, but then a crisis intervened, freezing the magazine for a long time. Returning to the topic today, we were surprised to find that it had suddenly become extremely popular. Articles about the city appear almost daily in periodicals, universities are opening master's programs in urban studies one after another, and there is an entire Strelka Institute in Moscow, where young people from a variety of specialties are introduced to urban studies. Joining such a well-coordinated chorus of professionals without having a direct relationship with them is a risky undertaking in all respects, and the editors wanted to abandon it. But since such a decision required immersion in the topic, at some point it became obvious to us that in fact there was no trace of any choir, even a duet or trio was not easy to find. There is a gulf between a city developing under market conditions with a strong urban community and what we inherited from the USSR. There are no ready-made recipes for how to overcome it, and so concepts and projects, often mutually exclusive, pour in like from a cornucopia. In Russian urban theory (not to mention practice) today there is nothing established: the old has been rejected, but has not gone away; the new has been proclaimed, but is emerging timidly and, so to speak, crookedly. Considering all this, OZ still considered it necessary to continue working on an issue of the magazine dedicated to urban studies.

The confusion and vacillation that characterize the field of Russian urban planning are fully reflected in this volume. First of all, this concerns the assessment of the relevant legislative framework. All authors criticize it, but sometimes from directly opposite positions. Some believe that there is too much market in it and it has suppressed everything social, others - on the contrary, that the market logic is not carried out consistently enough, there is no real competition, and this is precisely what gives rise to social problems. In fact, the debate is about where in urban planning, on which the well-being of citizens directly depends, the line should be drawn between the market and the state. Regarding the strategy for developing a network of Russian cities, that is, the scheme of the territorial organization of the country, the authors also do not have a common opinion. Among them there are those who propose to essentially set such a scheme in a directive manner and follow it in the same directive manner. Let’s not immediately write them down as retrogrades - after all, it’s hard not to agree with the fact that in Russia, with its vast spaces, the state cannot put up with the depopulation of Siberia and the Far East. Another thing is what methods it will use to solve this problem.

Moscow-centricity, which many consider almost a national Russian misfortune, unfortunately, could not be avoided in the room either. Partly because OZ is published in Moscow and everything that concerns the capital, the magazine’s employees cannot help but worry. But the main thing is different - the most large-scale urban development projects are being carried out right here, in this richest metropolis in the country. And all the ugly features of Russian urban planning are most clearly manifested here. First of all, this is the complete exclusion of citizens from the decision-making process concerning the city, and the fusion of the city administration with the construction business.

Today experts are primarily interested in everything related to the capital expansion project. Once again, our authors have differing opinions. Some believe that this is a movement in the right direction and a good example for other large cities - in a country where there is so much undeveloped land, it is simply stupid to crowd within the district. To this, however, the objection follows that such expansion does not solve any of the problems of the capital, and in general, one of the signs of a real city is compactness.

Naturally, the issue discusses the problem of housing, which is chronically in short supply in Russia and which is prohibitively expensive. The prospects here are not rosy. A huge number of panel houses built during the Soviet years require demolition or major repairs; The city infrastructure is practically not developing, which is why connecting new buildings to networks costs enormous amounts of money (hence the sky-high prices for apartments); when the cost of the building itself is only a small fraction of what is spent on approvals and the aforementioned network connections, developers have no incentive to develop building technologies. The colossal achievement of perestroika - the transfer of apartments to citizens - today often hinders the development of the domestic economy, since it reduces labor mobility. Here, one of the magazine’s authors believes, it is apparently impossible to do without a large-scale program for the construction of apartment buildings.

The architecture of buildings, historical preservation, public spaces, the sociology of urban communities, the problems of small towns - all these topics are reflected in one way or another in the volume. Of course, one must understand that, just like in medicine, where several weighty volumes are devoted to each organ, any detailed description of the urban organism cannot be crammed into one issue. Much of it is outlined in dotted lines, some had to be omitted altogether. And yet, despite the lack of space, we have placed several sketches dedicated to small and medium-sized cities of Russia under the heading “Eye-Meter”. We were attracted to them primarily by the optimistic view of the author, the famous Russian urbanist Vyacheslav Glazychev, on the future of these cities, an optimism that is not shared by many.