Rows of nine-story buildings, spillways, ugly advertising... Urbanist Pavel Gnilorybov on why we live in such an environment and how to change it
Miscellaneous / / June 05, 2023
We become professional citizens, move closer to the land and make friends with our neighbors.
Why Russian cities are ugly in places
In fact, we have many beautiful cities. The problem is that few people try to keep them that way. Unfortunately, the current attitude to architecture, which does not require deep reform, is beneficial to everyone.
1. Most citizens are transit passengers
A city is not just a collection of buildings, but, above all, an organism. To make the city beautiful, it is not enough to invite an architect who will design 20 buildings with columns and stucco. It is important how residents will interact with them.
There is such an English-language concept - a user of the city, a professional city dweller. It is he who breathes life into the architectural scenery. He participates in subbotniks, goes to exhibitions, uses public transport, and is interested in what is happening around him.
He can be contrasted with a transit passenger - a person who lives between a hypermarket, work and his apartment. He is completely not included in the life of the city and therefore does not ask questions to the space surrounding him.
The indifference of people is the cause of ugliness in the surrounding world. Ugliness is everything that does not touch the heart and does not make you take a selfie in the background.
I see the main problem not in the fact that there are no beautiful cities in Russia, but in the fact that many of our citizens, unfortunately, are transit passengers.
If even 15 years ago the question to a taxi driver was “Where do you go? What do you have to see?" thought you'd get a long list of recommendations, now the most common answer is "I don't know." People have no idea what is happening in their cities - they do not notice either beauty or ugliness.
2. Beauty is not a priority for anyone
Nobody is interested in making our cities more beautiful. Officials do not need a beautiful urban environment, because, most likely, its maintenance will be expensive.
Developers, with the exception of a small number of players in the market, also did not stick to beauty, because the priority indicator is the commissioning of square meters. And the fact that they are box-shaped, without a hint of originality and fantasy, does not interest anyone.
Have you solved the problem with orphans? Decided. Have you solved the problem with equity holders? Decided. Have you solved the dilapidated housing problem? Decided. And all these problems with the design code and the concept of the 15-minute city will be discussed exclusively on a couple of forums.
Le Corbusier believed that the house should be a "machine for living". What we see now in residential areas is the ideal implementation of his concept. An apartment in a socket can really serve as a sleeping cell, but then a person will still want to escape from it to that very beauty - Suzdal, Totma, Cherepovets. Why? Because it is unnatural for a person to live in a gray 24-story building.
Urbanism is just beginning to develop in Russia, but it is already clear that high-rise housing has a depressing effect on people.
Perhaps in a few years we will get a generation that will have a whole range of mental disorders solely because of the fact that 24-storey buildings are built around.
Do the inhabitants of the city need beauty? Residual principle. Only a few percent of buyers in the market are guided by an understanding of aesthetics. Buying his first studio or kopeck piece by the age of 35-40, the city dweller will forgive a lot: bad yards, unimportant transport, lack of parks and sports infrastructure.
On an area of 40-50 sq. m. he will create an island of paradise in a panel hell.
Sometimes, of course, people unite in the struggle for the coastline, green spaces, transport and kindergartens. But first of all, they fight for the social sphere, and not for beauty.
3. People are accustomed to "showcase" beauty
Another big problem is the huge gap between the historical center, most often pre-revolutionary, and Soviet and post-Soviet residential areas.
In Moscow, only 4% of the population lives within the Garden Ring. Museums and government offices close at 6 pm. There is a void. Of course, bars and pedestrian streets are trying to fill this void, but, objectively speaking, the centers of our cities are empty.
This is the lack of Russian cities: we have a shop window, which everyone is proud of, but there is an environment in which we live for the most part. time, with the typical aesthetics of f***s: rows of nine-story buildings, spills, ugly advertisements and a stop put in 20-30 years back.
There is a feeling that a person should receive beauty in a dosed manner - “inject” it into himself once a year: on the day of the city, when he goes to the center.
Like, for example, some Petersburgerswho do not use the infrastructure of the historical Vasilyevsky Island or Petrogradka at all. They live in Devyatkino, work in Devyatkino, die in Devyatkino.
4. Few opportunities to make a difference
There are about 1,100 cities in Russia, and only regional centers are growing out of them.
The village is dead, the next candidate for elimination is the small towns.
Over the past 30 years, many have left there. Gone are such backbone institutions as schools, hospitals, enterprises that could hold the frame. There is a strong deterioration of infrastructure - about 80-90%. The population is aging.
In small towns, there is no one to demand active change. But even if someone is, then often the chief city architects do not have enough authority to solve the problems addressed to them. From region to region, their set of functions changes: from an all-powerful god to a person who can only recommend something. And what is advisory in nature is being played with us... in different places.
How to make Russian cities beautiful
Our cities have good starting positions, you just need to learn how to interact with them in order to restore beauty.
1. Change attitudes towards historic housing
In order to change the functions of the historical center, to revive it, some of the buildings need to be transferred to the status of residential buildings. To do this, developers should give "gingerbread" for a good reconstruction of old buildings.
Then housing with history will begin to be appreciated and a market for historical real estate will appear, when a person can come to the agency and say: “I want a pre-revolutionary house, 80 square meters. Lord's apartment, like Professor Preobrazhensky's.
Another approach: to restore old private houses by ourselves. There are cities that did not have time to finish off with panels. For example, Tomsk or Vologda. There is a stereotype about the latter: as if all the houses there are surrounded by a carved palisade - a lace board fence. So: 10 years ago, this palisade was in a terrible state, but then the residents began to restore it, and it became fashionable to live in historical Vologda houses. Now the owner of such an estate can proudly say: “I drink tea on my own huge veranda. On the right side, squirrels jump on the trees, on the left, nightingales sing.
Of course, in order to restore such housing, forces are needed. But many of my acquaintances, adventurers of a crazy temperament, who have chosen this path, literally for 1.5–3 million rubles they received something that their peers living in 24 floors.
I'm trying to convey: if the housing is old, this is not a reason to solve problems with an ax.
2. Organize local self-government
Studying the experience of our neighbors with a similar historical fate in the former Czechoslovakia, Latvia, Lithuania, you understand that the problems with the reconstruction and repair of buildings are not so difficult to solve.
It works like this: the city gives the residents of the house an infrastructure loan. They look at what needs to be done with this money: replace the roof, insulate the walls, restore the facade. Citizens themselves are interested in solving these problems faster.
None of this would have been possible without good local government. And we, unfortunately, often do not even know the neighbors in the stairwell. We don't trust anyone, we have few horizontal connections. That is why we live in concrete boxes, where each of us can be an absolute individualist.
No wonder Russian men sit on the toilet for 40 minutes. They haven't had their own space for generations, and now they're having fun in the closet.
But historical memory has not forgotten life on earth and good neighborliness. Gradually, we can return to them in order to organize a strong self-government. Enough to make friends with the neighbors. To do this, you can organize a party for the entire yard, for example.
When the neighbors begin to communicate with each other, this will remove many social conflicts, and there will be flower beds - the first stage of trust of residents to each other.
3. Building a new home consciously
Now many developers are following the knurled path: obtaining a land plot, building a standard building, commissioning, connecting power grids and other communications, issuing keys. Therefore, it turns out that the average number of storeys in Krasnoyarsk practically does not differ from Moscow, although there are much fewer residents there. And so everywhere. Russian cities are a rake that has been repeatedly stepped on.
We need to move away from blind replication and rely on the characteristics of the regions.
Of course, everywhere there are high class LCDs that have already acquired legends - people can feel good there even on the fortieth floor. I don’t mind at all, but let there be only one such dominant in the whole city.
Still, living on the 35th floor is unnatural for a person. This is evidenced by medicine, and urban studies, and psychology, and chats of the residents themselves, who cannot take out the trash for 20 minutes or go nuts why there are 4,000 apartments and 200 parking spaces.
What to do? Don't reinvent the wheel. The best housing was built in pre-revolutionary times and several years after the war. For example, in the 1950s, many districts appeared with two-story or three-story stalinkas, which are now very much appreciated on the market.
To date, there are a couple of responsible developers who are commissioning 3-, 5-storey buildings and selling apartments in them for reasonable money. It is important to encourage their work so that more and more companies create new buildings based on the architectural traditions and the average number of storeys of the city.
4. Show people the beauty of the city
Our cities are beautiful depending on what kind of person is looking at them. I often ask people if they liked a certain city, and I get completely different answers: “Oh, no! Some churches” or “Oh yes! So many churches. 15 different styles and different regional layers…”. Or: "Such a boring city, only panels." But a person simply does not understand the panels and the features of industrial housing construction. In general, there are different series of panel houses, different approaches and tricks of builders who tried to decorate buildings.
You can sell anything. I do not know a single city in Russia where it would be impossible to find beauty.
For example, there is a canonical image Ryazan: kremlin, monument to mushrooms with eyes, cult of Yesenin. But few people know that at the end of the 19th century, the Jew Maxim Faktorovich lived there, who, for ease of pronunciation, changed his name to Max Factor. And then he founded a large cosmetic empire, known throughout the world. When people find out about this, they exclaim: “Wow! Mascara, which is advertised on every corner, was invented in Ryazan. You can always pull out some interesting story about the city and pack it emotionally.
Therefore, if you want to make city residents professional users rather than transit passengers, city walks and excursions can be organized. You can get a good channel, in which you will share architectural finds and tell urban legends. You can accustom the townspeople to a beautiful life, showing that it is possible.
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