Moscow Reconnects with Its River - Urban Land Magazine 31/03/15 10:03 Advertisement Urban Land Magazine INDUSTRY SECTORS Americas Asia Pacific CAPITAL MARKETS Europe MARKET TRENDS Foundation Join ULI SUSTAINABILITY DEVELOPMENT INFRASTRUCTURE PLANNING & DESIGN Urban Land > Planning & Design > Moscow Reconnects with Its River Moscow Reconnects with Its River Most Read Most Shared Rethinking Private Accessory Dwellings By Timothy Misir, Citiscope Text Size: A March 26, 2015 Print Email Share Facebook LinkedIn AA Twitter March 6, 2015 Golf: No Longer a Hole in One March 4, 2015 ULX: 10 Next-Wave Mixed-Income Housing Projects February 23, 2015 ULI Announces Final Four for 2015 Hines Competition March 2, 2015 13 Urban Trends to Watch March 26, 2015 Get Weekly Updates Enter Email Address SIGN UP The winning design proposal for the Moskva includes both natural and landscaped areas to reconnect city dwellers with the river. (Project Meganom) Barely a mile (1.6 km) from the Kremlin, an unusually warm winter evening draws a crowd to hang out along the bank of the Moscow River. Small groups of people sit on benches along the promenade, drinking mulled wine and eating sandwiches bought from pop-up food stands, while others gather around a bandstand where local indie music groups often perform. The river itself is quiet, and parts of it are still frozen, but even in summer there is not much river traffic, save for some sightseeing boats. This is the Crimean Embankment, known locally as Krymskaya Naberezhnaya. The 4.5-acre (1.8 ha) site was fully Advertisement pedestrianized just over a year ago. Parking spaces for cars and a busy roadway were replaced with a quay, fountains, sun loungers, bike rental facilities, and a boardwalk. A decommissioned cruise ship docked here offers boutique shopping and educational spaces, while artists sell paintings at a refurbished open-air market. The site immediately became a popular destination for skateboarders, cyclists, and other city dwellers wanting some respite by the water. Not long ago, this sort of public space was hard to imagine anywhere in Moscow, let alone by the river. Known as the Moskva, the waterway has long been severed from city life. For the most part, the river is a concrete-bound channel whose embankments are used for roads, parking, or industrial purposes. Mayor Sergei Sobyanin is intent on changing this—and making over this 0.6-mile (1 km) stretch of riverfront is just the beginning. Last fall, Russia’s capital sponsored an international design competition to reimagine what the whole river and its surrounding areas could look like 20 years from now. The winning plan, by a consortium led by the Moscow-based http://urbanland.uli.org/news/moscow-reconnects-river/ Page 1 sur 8 Moscow Reconnects with Its River - Urban Land Magazine 31/03/15 10:04 architecture firm Project Meganom, envisions a green waterfront with both sculpted parks and more natural spaces. It also imagines new transportation links—both on water and on land—that put the river at the heart of Moscow’s future. In recent years, the Moscow government has paid increasing attention to improving the quality of life for city residents, particularly through the development of cultural and recreational areas. Several streets in Moscow’s historical center have become fully pedestrianized—a rare victory for people over cars in the battle for city space. An ambitious makeover of the Gorky Park has turned a place that once was to be avoided into a model park whose biggest problem is coping with a crush of visitors. Sobyanin sees the river plans as another key piece of this livability strategy. It is also part of how Moscow hopes to compete against other European capitals in the global race for business, talent, and jobs. He put it this way in a December interview with news channel Russia-24: “I believe that improvement of public spaces is likely to give the city a competitive advantage.” “Forsaken Spaces” Moscow’s rivers were crucial to the city’s early development. In the mid–18th century, the city’s first industrial zones and factories were located along the Advertisement Moskva and Yauza rivers, enabling raw materials to be shipped in and finished goods shipped out. Although Moscow long ago ceased to be a center of industry, Related Articles dilapidated plants remain: Industrial zones account for about a quarter of Moscow’s 124 miles (200 km) of March 26, 2015 The Growing Separation of People and Jobs in Metropolitan America Between 2000 and 2012, the number of jobs within the typical commute distance for residents in a major metro area fell by 7 percent, according to new research by the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program. riverfront. Many residential districts also are situated along the Moskva, but a lack of recreation zones, amenities, and access to the waterfront means that the river is not part Plans call for introducing plants that would serve to filter water flows into the river. (Project Meganom) of life in the city. “As a resident of a building that faces the river, I know firsthand that walking along the river is no fun,” says architect and urbanist Nadia Nilina. “First of all, because it is nearly impossible to cross over the highway that severs the river from the city.” Getting from one side of the river to the other is not easy, either. Bridges are few and far between—some are spaced as far apart as nine miles (14 km). London and Paris have twice the number of pedestrian bridges as Moscow, despite having smaller populations. River pollution also is a problem, despite the fact that there aren’t many active industrial facilities along the river. ULI Global Awards for Excellence: Cedar Gateway – San Diego, California March 23, 2015 Cedar Gateway, a $32 million ROEM housing community, consists of 65 environmentally friendly apartments on seven floors above more than 4,300 square feet (400 sq m) of ground-level retail space. ULI Case Study: Riverfront Park of Denver, Colorado March 16, 2015 A transformative residential development capitalized on old rail-yard land in the heart of the city. Particularly in the city center, storm drains carry melting snow, road runoff, and silt into the river. That makes waterfront locations even less inviting. “They are forsaken spaces, abandoned by the city,” photographer Natalia Melnikova told the Architectural Council of Moscow after shooting a series of pictures of Moscow’s riverfront factories. “There is car traffic and technically there are sidewalks too, but nobody ever uses them.” Port of the Future The Crimean Embankment project showed that this could be changed. Building off the project’s success, Moscow officials staged the design competition to begin an even bigger conversation about what the river could become. Held by the Moscow General Planning Research and Project Institute, the state agency in charge of territorial planning, the competition was the largest in the city’s history. The design area covered more than 39 square miles (100 sq km). The goal was to make the Moskva’s embankments more accessible, to connect areas located close to the water and to make the river a focal point of the city. The competition’s brief used examples from waterfront revitalization projects in Oslo, Hamburg, and Bilbao, and cited master plans for Paris’s Seine, Berlin’s Spree, and London’s Thames Gateway as successful precedents for integrated river development. “People should be able to walk along the river, to access it easily,” Sergei Kuznetsov, the chief architect for the city of Moscow, told local radio station Vesti FM recently. “We have to create pedestrian and cycling routes, improve the territories that are abandoned, littered, or misused. It’s important because wastelands like this turn into breeding grounds for criminal activity, stray animals, and pollution. They have to be cleared, cleaned, and redeveloped.” Kuznetsov was part of the jury that picked Project Meganom’s entry from among six finalists. The winning concept is called “Port of the Future.” The term “port” is meant to signify not only new transit, walking, and cycling connections but also serve as a metaphor for the numerous focal points that would develop along the river—a new typology of public space for Moscow, where the city meets the river. The plan proposes creating 11 large ports and 26 smaller ones. At each location, the master plan introduces a combination of several simple “activation strategies.” These include increasing the amount of greenery, beautifying the embankments, creating landmarks, and introducing basic amenities that are currently lacking such as toilets, snack bars, and benches. http://urbanland.uli.org/news/moscow-reconnects-river/ Page 2 sur 8 Moscow Reconnects with Its River - Urban Land Magazine 31/03/15 10:04 “The idea is to bring some value to places near the river,” says Project Meganom’s Anna Kamyshan, the proposal’s project manager. “They are tools to make the river more active. They all work together.” The strategy is ecologically focused, paying a lot of attention to landscaping and proposing to incorporate wetland parks on the urban periphery. In the city center, a lower-level embankment with plants also would introduce more greenery and serve to filter water flows into the river, Kamyshan explains. The plan also aims to turn space for cars over to people. Roads along the river would be pushed back and replaced with promenades and cycling paths. The river itself would be the city’s new central street, with 75 miles (120 km) of green embankment by 2017. Rather than building new bridges across the river, a new focus would be placed on developing water transport. “I think it’s more of an ideological statement,” Kamyshan says. “There has never been a design proposal for all of the river’s coastal territories. So I believe it’s the first step towards opening the river to the city’s inhabitants, and of course, it’s not the last one.” Implementation and Obstacles The focus nowadays is turning to implementation. As the competition’s winner, Project Meganom will be invited to be a consultant in the city’s efforts to revitalize its riverfront, though Kuznetsov, the city’s chief architect, has said that ideas from all six finalists will be incorporated into the city’s final plans. Some doubt whether the city can follow through on its big visions. Moscow’s economy is weak, dragged down by international sanctions against Russia. Inflation is taking off and the ruble has fallen in value against the U. S. dollar by almost half in the past year. Meanwhile, the city has other commitments, such as developing “New Moscow,” a massive territory absorbed by the city in 2011. “I have serious doubts that the enthusiasm associated with the newly discovered discipline of urbanism in Moscow will last much longer,” says Nilina, who also took part in the competition with the Dutch urban design practice Maxwan. Nilina also highlights the unclear and sometimes conflicting goals of city authorities and a lack of communication between departments. “To achieve serious results in the redevelopment of the postindustrial zones on the river, broad consensus between the developers and the administration must be achieved,” she says. “We need strong alliances built, where the city is responsible for the protection and multiplication of the ‘public good’ and the developers have clear rules and incentives to implement serious projects in the city.” Project Meganom’s Kamyshan echoes Nilina’s concerns. “We need new investment models,” she says. “Those places belong to the city. They basically have to be developed using city money, and these sums are huge. They just can’t do it. They can only afford to do one small area, like the Crimean Embankment, and that’s all. The outskirts of the city center stay untouched.” Zoning rules also will need to be changed to realize Moscow’s riverfront ambitions. Many areas along the river are not zoned for commercial and mixed-use development. Only certain functions, such as schools, are allowed at other sites. As Kamyshan says, “If you aren’t allowed to build anything, how can you ask investors to pay for anything?” Mayor Sobyanin says these problems can be overcome. Developing tourism, culture, and recreation remains a priority for Moscow, even in lean economic times, he says. “Many say that this is not the right time for improvement projects, such as parks, pedestrian-only streets and squares, and open spaces, and suggest mothballing all of them,” he said in the interview with Russia-24. “If we want to attract people and investment and have a sustainable economy, we should not cut investment. Rather, we should encourage more investment to make the city comfortable and people-friendly.” Citiscope is a nonprofit news outlet that covers innovations in cities around the world. More at Citiscope.org. SHOW COMMENTS 13 Urban Trends to Watch By Henry Cisneros Text Size: A March 26, 2015 Print Email Share Facebook LinkedIn AA Twitter Adapted from Urban Real Estate Investment: A New Era of Opportunity, now available at the ULI Bookstore. The contours of an urban renaissance—long in the making—are quickly coming into focus. Massive societal and economic changes are converging to create a new urban reality, a transformation of importance to the millions of Americans in the nation’s metropolitan areas. Demographic changes are creating markets for mixed-use and mixedincome models of urban design. Job growth in advanced industries fits the preferences of knowledge workers attracted to urban neighborhoods. The “smart” institutions of the new economy, such as research universities and http://urbanland.uli.org/news/moscow-reconnects-river/ Page 3 sur 8
© Copyright 2024