Photo: Varvara Lozenko

Grigory Revzin and Ilya Oskolkov-Censer

Ilya Oskolkov-Censer: everyone has one general feeling about Moscow-it suddenly became worse sharply here. Moreover, this feeling appeared in everyone - poor, rich, educated, uneducated. And this has quite a little relation to the quality of modern Moscow architecture.

Grigory Revzin: Our architecture is bad, but what to talk about it? As criticism, this is unpleasant for me, but you have to look the truth-people are quite indifferent to people. At the same time, in addition to Moscow, which was built, in general, according to the tastes of Yuri Mikhailovich, we also have a ruble, built with private money with the best architects - and it is no better! Moreover, as the habitat she degraded much more rapidly. In 1993, it was Switzerland near Moscow, not without its problems, but still. And now it is a highly urbanized environment, terribly uncomfortable. You are forced to sit in a luxurious villa, but behind a high fence and inside the protected circuit, and you can see another 20 of the same villas from the window, although you are actually outside the city. So the point is not as architecture.

I.O.-Ts.: The problem of Moscow is primarily that society does not understand what he needs, where we want to be at all.

GD: Now, in connection with the discussion of the general plan about the city, they say a lot, but the proportions are strange. The most urgent topic was the problem of transport, in second place was the problem of monuments. At the same time, the problem of, say, social stratification is not interested in anyone, as if there is no, the energy problem, too. Ecology is not interested in anyone at all.

I.O.-Ts.: It seems to me that it is pointless to blame everything on power-it is no different from us. Well, corruption, that is, of course. But if now take a hundred of our intelligent friends and ask them to tell how everything should be arranged in Moscow, I’m afraid that the conversation will not go beyond the position “Do something with traffic jams, and let's all go on bicycles”. Even this relatively enlightened, informed part of society has no dreams. We have no ambitions. We would just like not all the pretty old houses break out and that, if possible, they did not overlap the city so often. That, in fact, is all.

G. If we now remove Luzhkov, will the development go on its own?

I.O.-Ts.: So it goes by itself. I would not overestimate the role of Luzhkov. Luzhkov is just an element of local ecology, in which there is no other will, except for the will of business. But the city as a business project is quite successfully implemented, not even without some brilliance. Any business is trying to monopolize everything, reduce competition, and if this can be done through power, he, of course, will do it.

GD: It generally seems to me that the standard of living in Moscow, bearing in mind that there is Russia nearby, is so incredibly overstated. Therefore, it seems to me enough a rather modest scenario - just to avoid obvious dangers. Say, if we calculate how much housing is supposed to be built according to the new general plan, it turns out that the population of Moscow will increase by 2025 by another 3-3.5 million. That is, 16-17 million people will live in the city. Let's answer the question - do this city need so much or not?

I.O.-Ts.: But can this be adjusted? Until the standard of living in Moscow is so higher than in Tomsk or Tajikistan, people will go here.

G.: Of course, nothing can be done with this. But why do we throw 2 million square meters of housing into the market with our own hands? Previously, this problem was not, the Moscow construction complex built housing for very rich people, in which no one lived - the Ostozhenka is empty. But since 2004, almost all construction companies are building mass housing. We create a proposal, that is, we call people to ourselves, and people with money. These people have cars - this means that two more cars will be added to Moscow. With current traffic jams, people spend on average 5 hours in transport. And it will be 8. But this is a critical figure, because in a day 24 hours, 8 hours people sleep and work another 8 hours. I do not think that people will want to spend 8 hours in traffic jams.

I.O.-Ts.: And what happens to the city in such a situation?

GD: He is sharply degrading. This is an example of Cairo, some Latin American cities. Or Mexico City, where 20 million people live. People are simply starting to transfer their business to other cities. Here, of course, the area of pure abstraction begins, because, by and large, where can they go? In Russia, there is a very weak network of cities. Between Moscow and St. Petersburg - 800 kilometers. In Germany, there are five cities for such a distance in which you can live perfectly. In Russia there are also cities there - Vyshny Volochek, Bologoe, or here is my beloved city of Prybropuzhsk - a city where people scare the otter.

I.O.-Ts.: I also like the Likhoslavl.

GD: Maybe to transfer the capital to Likhoslavl or Podropuzhsk? In principle, this is even a positive scenario - in the sense of the quality of life, everything is fine there. The ecology is perfect, there are schools, monuments, nature, historical environment - come in and use. There is simply no money there. But if the money starts to escape from here, they theoretically have where to run.

I.O.-Ts.: Money is still running from here-and seriously speaking, they run to the west. All high -level businesses in Russia can be located only in Moscow, at the headquarters of the Supreme Commander. But if you have the opportunity, you will do everything so that in Moscow there is as a smaller part of your business. All that is possible, you prefer to arrange in Warsaw, or in Budapest, or in Prague. Or I have friends who open the headquarters of a large Russian company in London. But for Moscow, these are absolutely fatal processes - the money that these people could spend on housing here, so that their children could study normally, and relatives had high -quality medicine - they spend in another place. In this sense, it seems to me an absolute mistake by the idea of Skolkovo - because it says in direct text: in Moscow it did not work out, we will try in another place. Rublevka is a city for the rich, Skolkovo - for smart ones. And then Moscow then?

G.: As for Skolkovo, I just do not agree. In fact, it is very bad for Moscow that we do not create new city values. For Moscow, the only value is the center. The perfect place is the Kremlin, the farther from it, the worse. But since all valuables are in the center and all ties pass through the center, it means that there will always be the largest traffic jam. It is necessary to create new values on the periphery of Moscow.

A serious problem is that our power behaves as a business. And it tends to repeat business. I built an elite house on Kutuzovsky - I will build a few more nearby. And in the hoods of warehouses. What happens as a result? If you mentally draw a line, say, from Sheremetyevo to the university, in the east there will be everything poor, bad, industrial, cheap. And in the West - expensive and high -quality. And the logic of business is preserving this scheme. For example, according to the general plan, it is planned to build 49 skyscrapers. Of these, 19 falls on the western part of the city, and 30 on the eastern. But not a single site is even bought in the eastern, because who would think to build a skyscraper in Biryulyo? Now, if you come up with a new concept for Biryulyovo, think of why live there, and then combine these new centers with chords, this would greatly improve the situation. And the creation of Skolkovo is a thought in the right direction.

I.O.-Ts.: But the myth cannot be created by killing another myth. Skolkovo is anti-Moscow. It follows that Moscow is over.

GD: Maybe here is a question of formulations. But in general, after all, no one even raises the question like that. And these new centers are an obvious underpheited resource for the city. Well, why build an “orange” from the Central House of Sciences? Why attach another attraction to one attraction? Everyone goes there anyway. You can put it next to Zil, this is very close, and the price of the apartments there is several times lower. So you can increase the capitalization of this working quarter every 10 times. We have an agenda, unfortunately, determines either power or business, therefore a simple logic is obtained-now the P-44 series is good, which means that we will do them further. And in European countries it is determined to a large extent architects. They say: “There is such a great way of life - Townhaus in the city center” - and suddenly modern Townhouse begin to appear in London, which have not been there for quite some time. For the last time, the architects determined the agenda for the last time-that is, generally speaking, a dream-in the 1920s. We have neither people nor structures professionally inventing ideals for which it is worth living.

I.O.-Ts.: By and large, we in the “Strelka” just want to create such a center-a place where people think not only about what the design should be or how the building should look, but why. I was present at the pre -protection of course projects in Markhi. There it was necessary to choose any site in Moscow and design a school, anyway, without looking back with money. The projects were different, they were quite expressive, but one thing struck me - almost all of their schools were in the forest. They all designed such an ideal hogvarts with birds and squirrels, which had nothing to do with Moscow. And neither they themselves nor the teachers noticed this. According to my observations, domestic architects have no own agenda now. They are absolutely servile in relation to developers. It is necessary to somehow create a school that will begin to produce ideas that can captivate society.

"Big City": what can the city save, what are the obvious solutions?

G.: Look, we have built a lot of housing in Moscow, in 10 years - about 3 million square meters. Of these, investment, that is, those in which people do not live, according to various estimates, about 70%. The uniqueness of the situation is also associated with the fact that in Moscow almost all housing, 95%, is in private property. Imagine that we found a way to somehow force the owners of apartments to rent this idle housing-it would solve a bunch of problems! Firstly, the price of housing is falling. Secondly, we remove the problem of mobility-in European cities, it is very rare that the young man lives in a conditional Bibirevo, and go to work for the South-West, he takes off closer to work. People stop driving through the center, the problem of transport is solved, a colossal resource is released. So, in Berlin there is such a scheme: if you own an apartment, you don’t live in it and do not rent it out, then the tax on it is more than if you passed it. That is, it is very unprofitable for you not to hand it over. And everyone is handing over.

Another resource is industrial zones. After all, how does it work? There is a city of the 19th century, on its outskirts, 8-15 kilometers from the Kremlin - an industrial ring with a width of four kilometers. The city stepped over it and began to develop further, and the ring remained. A long time ago, he was bought under the root of the landlords and now they do not know what to do with him. Previously, everything grew in price, but now it is incomprehensible. On the general plan, these zones are simply painted in gray. So, maybe the city needs to redeem these zones, make new transport rings there or something else?

Another resource is transport. We have the feeling that the more cars, the richer the city remained from the Soviet regime. But the opposite is true: the richer the city, the more people drive public transport and the more expensive it is to use a personal machine. Let's count: the average Moscow car costs 15 thousand dollars, a person uses it for about 5 years. That is, trips on his own car cost him $ 10 a day. And plus gasoline - well, about 5 more dollars a day. $ 15 is actually a little money, go by taxi twice. In cities comparable to Moscow in terms of living standards, this amount is 2-2.5 times more-about 30 dollars a day. We have 3 million cars in the city, we multiply - it turns out that movement around Moscow should cost $ 90 million a day. Multiply by 365 days - 32.8 billion dollars a year. This is the amount that can be obtained for solving the problems of Moscow transport. For this money, you can increase the Moscow road surface 2-3 times, make an infinite number of tunnels. Do all the necessary chords in sleeping areas, make huge underground parking. Of course, this is a difficult task: a 30-milliard market, you need to come up with a movement system in a 12 millionth city. The task for the Google level corporation.

But it is impossible to even criticize the current transport system in Moscow, because it is not at all! We are trying to use all solutions at once, we have huge parking lots with the opportunity to park on the sidewalk for free. This is absurd.

I.O.-Ts.: In London, they made entry into the center paid, and all the money received in this way goes to a special fund, which can spend it only on public transport. A simple and very elegant solution. But we still have to work to ensure that a person descending in the subway does not look like a loser. Because now - what is it, a person without a car? Girls will not give him just. But the mayor of Paris Bertrand Delainoe was re -elected with the slogan "I will make the life of motorists in Paris unbearable." And they chose him! We are quite far from that.

BG: Is there a city where everything was as bad as in Moscow, and then it got better?

G.: Yes, this is by and large all European cities. Look at Rome Fellini is Moscow today. Look at what they go there, who stands on the streets. Some nightmarish pegs, traffic jams, half-bank-Polulumepen on the city outskirts. But only this is Rome 40 years ago.

I. O.-Ts.: Improving the urban environment is generally the main content of European policy of the last 20 years. And examples are the sea. The most signful, of course, Barcelona. It was a very expressive dumb port city with a separate world of boulevards, where the bourgeois lived. In one tourist series with Rome, Paris and London, he stood up recently. Now the same thing happens with Palermo. Then Bilbao. London is changing before our eyes. Helsinki - although 20 years ago it was the most dull place in the world. Hong Kong is trying to become the cultural capital of China, although there was no culture there. They swell a bunch of money, build 19 theaters, hired the best architects in the world.

G .: The first was, of course, Berlin, who completely re -reeds himself after the unification of Germany. Another textbook example is Manchester. Or San Francisco, where the air is now cleaner than ever over the past 100 years, although the population has grown there by 15 times. That is, in fact, much is possible.

BG: In Moscow, the lack of a normal urban environment is still terribly annoyed. Squares, street cafes, parks. You can do something with this?

I. O.-Ts.: It is necessary to legally ban the deaf first floors. These terrible pieces of deaf walls on the central streets.

G.: This is connected with the national mentality, oddly enough. In England, at least from the 18th century, civilization has been developing in clubs and pubs. In France - in a cafe. And in Russia - in apartments. Salons of the 19th century are apartments, revolutionary circles are apartments, the intelligentsia of the 1960s parked in the kitchens. We have a closed type of life, but what to do in the city, we have not come up with. You can walk, yes. But the deaf walls do not interfere with this. This is characteristic of Asia: Delhi, Bishkek, Baku. Deaf walls and pieces of life between them.

I.O.-Ts.: All, of course, is changing gradually. A working girlfriend’s girlfriend is no longer calling for a visit, but to the “chocolate”. But there are still not enough places for a cafe.

GD: We have very feudal cities. Take Petersburg - there are kilometers of embankment. But the first floors are all deaf, and not a single cafe. Because in the city of feudalism people eat at home. On the embankments, they only walk, and then in a carriage. If you look at Paris in the paintings of the impressionists, there all the first floors are a cafe. There will be two such places in St. Petersburg. And now there is a cafe there, but they are empty, because it would come to mind that they are fed in this granite basement? Boiler room, torture camera - yes. But a cafe?

I.O.-Ts.: There is a need. People want to walk somewhere. Everything is clogged in Moscow. In absurdly expensive, tasteless, ugly places people are still sitting.

G.: Here is another problem is that small business in Moscow is not having survived. This is a very monopolized city.

I.O.-Ts.: The French, for example, legally support everything unique, private and non-settle. They do not allow large bookstores to lower prices for books below a certain level to protect small book. They do not allow bakery and pharmacies to unite on the network. It would seem, what do we have to do with it? But there is a Moscow notaries market. He is completely nonsense, he is decentralized. Each notary is a personal small business. So, in Moscow this could be?

BG: Strictly speaking, everyone has one question: what can we do?

I.O.-Ts.: Can the townspeople change the city contrary to the desire of the authorities? This is an important question. The true answer is not. But the townspeople can begin a public discussion, and this is much more important than it seems. No one is discussing, but how transport can be arranged in our city. But the topic itself - it is now worried about everyone. Moreover, if you notice, she became worried about all about two years ago. Как-то все вдруг почувствовали, что в Москве что-то надломилось. И нам надо сделать эту тему модной — так, чтобы светские девушки обсуждали выделенные полосы и подземные парковки. На наших глазах это происходило много раз — с современным искусством, с «Фейсбуком». Урбанистика — это то, что носится в воздухе. And thank God. Из этого может вырасти что-то очень важное.

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