F E AT U R E By Fiona Shaw
Fiona Shaw is an award-winning business journalist and publisher of Ethos magazine.
1 1. Moscow’s Garden Ring flows faster and is a safer and healthier environment, following Strelka KB’s Moscow Street programme. 2. ‘Before’: up to 16 lanes of traffic wove their way through parts of Garden Ring. Images © Strelka KB
The new pioneers Across the Russian Federation, straddling Europe and Asia, a comprehensive new plan is transforming not just the physical and cultural landscape, but citizens’ relationship with place. The Moscow Street programme blends minute attention to detail with big data to create a forward-looking, historically sensitive plan for the Russian capital’s future.
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rban consultancy Strelka KB led the project, which is now being rolled out across the country. Strelka KB’s origins lie in the Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design. Founded in 2009, the nongovernmental organisation’s aim is to change the cultural and physical landscapes of Russian cities by taking an experimental approach to education, developing human capital and applying research to real problems in Russian cities. The Institute founded urban consultancy Strelka KB in 2013. Its approach focuses on the city as an integrated system, developing Russian cities to meet the demands of the knowledge economy.
Dasha Paramonova is CEO of Strelka Architects, part of Strelka KB. She explains the background. “An analysis of 3,500 streets allowed us to extract a typology, based on parameters like the width of street or height of buildings, historical area, speed of traffic, number of lanes and amount of pedestrians. We extracted ten types of street – although there is a list of unique streets which don’t fit these types. “We developed an approach with five main principles – safety, ecology, uniqueness, diversity and comfort, that each street should respond to. Soviet norms only responded to geometrical parameters, never taking into account ecology or diversity or identity.”
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Design updates run the risk of being “rather superficial,” she says. “Simply replacing pavements or lamp posts is not transforming or introducing new scenarios for visitors, or thinking about how this street will operate in the future and what it brings to the environment. It relies on the vision of a specific designer – it doesn’t take into 55
