“Let the prosecutor’s office protest later”

The city authorities do not want to spend money on publishing the general plan

Apparently, most Muscovites will never be able to familiarize themselves with the urban planning plans of the capital’s officials. Yesterday, deputies from United Russia, ignoring the protests of the communists and the comments of the prosecutor's office, adopted in the first reading the draft updated general plan of Moscow until 2025 and the rules of land use and development. And although the approval of these documents was not yet final, United Russia was worried not so much about their content as about the question of whether it was worth spending budget money on the publication of urban planning maps prepared by the Moskomarkhitektura.

As Mikhail Moskvin-Tarkhanov, chairman of the Moscow City Duma commission on long-term development and urban planning, said, deputies “for the first time faced the problem of publishing a huge act that will not be entirely accessible to citizens.” According to the deputy, “several thousand pages of color cartographic material” are to be published. United Russia members are confident that replicating the urban planning plans of officials will only “place an unbearable burden on the city budget,” but will still not ensure “proper accessibility” due to the narrowly professional nature of the document.

As Mr. Moskvin-Tarkhanov previously stated, the draft documents occupy about 9.5 thousand pages, and in the form laid out for the public press they total about 19 thousand pages. The deputies believe that it will be enough to publish only a dozen copies and supply them to councils and prefectures, as well as “some libraries.” For the majority of citizens, United Russia members are sure, it will be much easier to study the documents of the general plan and the PZZ in electronic form. “Why publish hundreds of these documents? Submit them to the library in electronic form, and any grandparents who can use a computer will read them. If someone, of course, is interested,” 72-year-old deputy Anatoly Petrov offered his version of publishing the developments of the city construction complex.

The Chairman of the Commission on Regulations, Rules and Procedures of the Moscow City Duma, Alexander Krutov, called on his colleagues to be efficient in working on documents. In his opinion, the issue of publishing the general plan is of a purely technical nature and can be resolved after it comes into force. “Let the prosecutor’s office protest later. We will find out in court what publication means,” he said. According to Mr. Krutov, in Russia only the Constitution was published in large numbers, and “the majority of the country’s population is unfamiliar with the rest of the legislative acts.”

However, apparently, the reminder about the mandatory publication of urban planning documentation was not the only remark of the prosecutor's office. According to Mr. Krutov, the supervisory authority noticed that the documents did not go through all the proper approval procedures in the federal authorities. Both according to Moscow United Russia members and according to the document’s developers, this omission is solely the fault of federal officials. “The previous master plan also did not reach this stage. Let the law live, and we will defend it in courts and in debates,” Alexander Krutov urged not to take this technical formality into account.

“For me, this is deja vu,” Moscow’s chief architect Alexander Kuzmin confirmed to Vremya Novostei, recalling that even the current urban planning document has not received the final visa from all federal ministries. At the same time, according to him, approvals relate exclusively to the “metropolitan functions” of the city, and not to the actual content of the general plan as such. The Moscow Committee for Architecture and Urban Development apparently considers it quite sufficient that the document was sent to the Ministry of Regional Development, and from there to other ministries. At the same time, there is no general agreement from the Ministry of Regional Development of Russia, as Mr. Kuzmin noted in an interview with journalists.

But, as the chief architect of the capital assures, Moscow managed to come to an agreement with its regional colleagues. “For them, everything around Moscow is the same golden mile, like we have around the Kremlin, but for us it is the periphery. We sent waste incineration plants and some other things to our periphery that would have been logical to send there,” said the chief architect, explaining that his colleagues had to change the functional zoning of some territories in order to persuade their colleagues near Moscow to agree on the general plan.

It is noteworthy that any criticism - be it numerous complaints about the new urban planning regulations of the expert community or statements of three deputies from the Communist Party in the Moscow City Duma - were accepted by the city United Russia members solely as an attempt to “replace amateur vision with serious professional analysis.” The minority could only, as the newly appointed second deputy chairman of the Moscow City Duma from the Communist Party faction Nikolai Gubenko put it, “sympathize with this general plan and the PZZ.”

Yulia KHOMCHENKO