ОБРАЗОВАТЕЛЬНАЯ ПРОГРАММА 2013/14: ПОВСЕДНЕВНОСТЬ Жители российских городов ездят на машинах по загруженным улицам, сидят перед компьютерами в конторах и офисах, встречаются в кафе с друзьями, покупают в магазинах вещи и продукты, а дома — воспитывают детей, делают ремонт и смотрят телевизор. Всё это привычные будни, огромный и сложный мир обыденного, на самом деле очень мало исследованный и слабо отрефлексированный. В 2013/14 году «Стрелка» выбрала темой своей образовательной программы «Повседневность», или Urban Routines. Из чего складывается обыденная жизнь города? Как наша новая реальность соотносится с прошлым и каких изменений можно ждать в будущем? Возможно ли, исследуя структуру обыденного, прийти к масштабным выводам и сделать на их основе инновационные проекты? Эти и другие вопросы находились в центре внимания пяти проектноисследовательских студий «Стрелки» — Жилье/Dwelling, Офисы/ Offices, Автомобили/Cars, Магазины/Retail и Связи/Links. В этой публикации представлены результаты работы студии «Автомобили».
Электронный вариант публикации и результаты работы других студий доступны на issuu.com/strelkainstitute
EDUCATION PROGRAMME 2013/14: URBAN ROUTINES Every day city dwellers drive their cars through over-populated streets, sit in front of their office computers, meet friends at local cafes, buy goods and groceries in stores and shops, at home educate their children, renovate, watch TV. The very usual routine, a gigantic and complex world of the ordinary, is in fact quite under-researched and poorly analyzed. In 2013/14 Strelka chose Urban Routines as the theme of its education programme. What defines the daily life of a city? How does the past influence our present reality and what will the future entail? By researching the fabric of the ordinary, is it possible to arrive at ambitious outcomes and create on their basis innovative projects? These and other issues were the focal point of five of Strelka’s research and design studios: Dwelling, Offices, Cars, Retail and Links. This publication presents research outcomes of studio Cars.
This and other studio publications are available for download at issuu.com/strelkainstitute
ДИРЕКТОР Тео Дойтингер РУКОВОДИТЕЛЬ ПРОЕКТА Сергей Чернов ИССЛЕДОВАТЕЛИ Виталий Авдеев, архитектор, Украина; Александр Аюпов, программист, Россия; Ирина Еременко, проектировщик образовательных институций, Россия; Олена Гранкина, архитектор, Украина; Елена Мазина, архитектор, Россия; Джулио Маргери, архитектор, Италия; Сабина Маслова, географ и аналитик, Россия; Рул ван Херпт, специалист по вопросам культурного развития, Нидерланды; Джеймс Шредер, архитектор и урбанист, США. ЭКСПЕРТЫ-КОНСУЛЬТАНТЫ Алексей Белянин, Международный институт экономики и финансов, доцент, ВШЭ; Анна Броновицкая, кандидат искусствоведения, доцент МАРХИ, редактор журналов «Проект Россия» и «Проект International», специалист по архитектуре и градостроительству советского периода; Виктор Вахштайн, Центр фундаментальной социологии, ВШЭ; Максим Воеводский, руководитель направления клиентской аналитики, Мегафон; Вукан Вучич, профессор университета Пенсильвании, ведущий эксперт министерства транспорта США; Максим Дубинин, директор компании NextGIS, эксперт по геоинформационным системам; Екатерина Герасимова, художник, специалист по автомобильной аэрографии; Петр Иванов, научный редактор журнала UrbanUrban; Максим Кац, политический и общественный деятель, депутат муниципального собрания московского района Щукино; Иван Климов, кандидат социологических наук, руководитель методического отдела Фонда «Общественное мнение», доцент ВШЭ; Ростислав Кононенко, старший преподаватель кафедры общей социологии, ВШЭ;
Вадим Коровин, координатор Федерации автовладельцев России; Антон Лисовец, дизайнер автомобильного стиля, владелец интернет магазина "rue parts; Александр Медведев, основатель автоклуба Mazda в России; Федерико Паралотто, специалист по транспорту и системам мобильности, член экспертного совета по устойчивому мастер-плану транспортной системы Милана, партнер в Mobility in Chain; Роман Постников, директор по сегментному маркетингу и клиентской аналитике ОАО «МегаФон»; Константин П., эксперт по Шанхаю, владелец гаража; Денис Ромодин, историк архитектуры, краевед, кандидат политических наук; Анна Соколова, Институт этнологии и антропологии, РАН; Михаэль Шиндхельм, консультант по вопросам культуры; Артур Шахбазян, департамент транспорта и развития дорожно-транспортной инфраструктуры; Александр Шумский, руководитель проекта «Пробок.нет»; Алексей Хохулин, ведущий программист Центра Digital October; Андрей, Сергей, Артур, Вадим, водители-таксисты.
DIRECTOR Theo Deutinger PROJECT LEADER Sergey Chernov RESEARCHERS Vitaliy Avdyeyev, architect, Ukraine; Alexander Ayoupov, programmer, Russia; Irina Eremenko, educational designer, Russia; Olena Grankina, architect, Ukraine; Roel van Herpt, cultural strategist, the Netherlands; Giulio Margheri, architect, Italy; Sabina Maslova, geographer and research analyst, Russia; Elena Mazina, architect, Russia; James Schrader, architect and urbanist, USA. EXTERNAL EXPERTS Aleksey Belyanin, assistant professor, head of Laboratory for Experimental and Behavioural Economics at the Higher School of Economics; Anna Bronovitskaya, professor of Moscow Architecture Institute (MARKHI), editor of the magazines Project Russia and Project International; Maxim Dubinin, director of NextGIS, GIS-expert; Yekaterina Gerasimova, artist, car aerography specialist; Pyotr Ivanov, scientific editor of UrbanUrban. ru project; Max Katz, political and social activist, Municipal Assembly of Moscow member for the district of Shchukino; Alexey Khokhulin, lead programmer at Digital October Centre; Ivan Klimov, Ph.D. in Sociology, senior researcher, Institute of Sociology RAS, lecturer at Faculty of Sociology at the State University Higher School of Economics; Rostislav Kononenko, senior lecturer, Department of Sociology at Higher School of Economics; Vadim Korovin, coordinator of the Federation of Automobile Owners
of Russia; Anton Lisovets, car stylist, owner of the "True parts" online shop; Alexander Medvedev, founder of the Mazda Car Club in Russia; Federico Paralotto, transportation expert, Mobility In Chain; Roman Postnikov, director of segment marketing and customer analytics at Megafon; Konstantin P., Shanghai guide, garage owner; Denis Romodin, architectural historian; Michael Schindhelm, cultural advisor; Arthur Shakhbazyan, Department of Transport and Road Infrastructure Development; Alexander Shumsky, CEO of Probok.net project; Anna Sokolova, Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology RAS; Viktor Vakhstein, Centre for Fundamental Sociology, HSE; Maxim Voevodsky, Customer Analytics Team Lead, Megafon; Vukan Vuchic, professor of University of Pennsylvania, lead transportation expert for the US government; Andrei, Sergei, Artur, Vadim, taxi drivers, Moscow.
ГОРОД, АВТОМОБИЛЬ И ЖИТЕЛИ Эта книга представляет результаты деятельности исследовательской студии «Автомобили» Института медиа, архитектуры и дизайна «Стрелка» за 2014 год. Основной задачей студии и, как следствие, этой книги стали поиск и проявление скрытых связей между Москвой, ее жителями и автомобилем. Результаты исследования представлены как альтернативная московская реальность. Транспортная инфраструктура Москвы стала своего рода увеличительным стеклом, помогающим прояснить противостояние индивидуального и коллективного, запланированного и случайного, управляемого и управляющего. С точки зрения водителя, автомобиль представляется как некая «машина свободы», позволяющая людям распространять их свободу и власть. Это заставляет их выбирать между нападением и побегом: покуситься на закон, нормы и привычный уклад города или убежать от них. В таком городе, как Москва, населенном людьми, чрезвычайно ценящими личную свободу, но в то же время находящимися под постоянным чрезмерным политическим давлением, борьба между личной свободой и коллективной властью становится очень яркой. В следующих частях книги мы представим вам особенности жизни с этой «машиной свободы» и без нее. Для москвичей автомобиль — очень недавнее дополнение к жизни, вследствие чего владение им воспринимается без лишней рефлексии, и сервисов кар-шеринга — совместного пользования автомобилей — практически не существует. Парадоксально, но Москва находится в авангарде общественного транспорта среди европейских городов, благодаря ее великолепной системе метро, которое продолжает расти в ответ на увеличение автомобильных пробок. Что же уникального в городской повседневности, порождаемой автомобилями и другими видами мобильности? Как может исследование повседневности дать новый взгляд на город или показать его будущее? Как часть исследования, поездка студии в Казань раскрыла изолированный характер московских особенностей дорожной инфраструктуры. В нескольких километрах от МКАДа асфальт высокого качества внезапно исчезает и дорожное полотно испещряется выбоинами. В официальной и простой речи эти
THE CITY, THE AUTOMOBILE, AND THE RESIDENTS This book summarizes the results of a research studio at the Strelka Institute for Architecture, Media, and Design in the spring of 2014. The primary focus of the studio and subsequently this book has been to discover and show explicitly the intrinsic relationship between people, the car, and the city of Moscow. The newly gained insights are reinterpreted as alternative, Moscow-specific, realities. The most striking finding exposes the car infrastructure as a magnifier of the struggle between the individual and the collective, the unplanned and the planned, the controlled and the controller. To drivers, the car seems to be a kind of “freedom-machine”, which enables people to accelerate their liberty and power. This intoxicating mixture provides a choice between attack and escape: to attack or escape the law, the rules, and the city. In a city like Moscow, inhabited by people with an extreme desire for personal freedom and ruled with extreme political power, the clash between individual freedom and collective power becomes highly visible. In the following chapters, the virtues of a life with and without this “freedom-machine” will be revealed. For Muscovites the car is a very new addition to their lives, which is why car ownership is something beyond question and car-sharing services are virtually nonexistent. Paradoxically, Moscow is also at the forefront of public transportation among European cities due to its magnificent Metro infrastructure, which continues to grow in response to Moscow’s massive automobile traffic jams. What is unique about the city’s urban routines by car and by other forms of mobility? How can studying routines help us to reinterpret the city or to imagine a future for Moscow that is specific to its own unique conditions rather than simply adopting international standards and predictable strategies? Part of the research process, a studio road trip to Kazan unveiled the nature of Moscow’s unique island condition in terms of Russian road infrastructure. A few kilometers beyond the MKAD, Moscow’s largest urban ring road and municipal border, high-quality asphalt soon comes to an end and the road becomes perforated by potholes. Officially
дороги считаются «трассами». Если применить мировые стандарты, их смело можно назвать просто дорогами. Светофоры и пешеходные переходы часты, ограничения скорости встречаются каждые 10–15 километров из-за того, что дорога идет сквозь деревни, и раздельные многополосные автомагистрали практически не существуют. Можно сказать, что Россия еще догонит, еще разовьет систему автомагистралей до мировых стандартов в обозримом будущем. Но есть также вероятность, что она умышленно не работает над дорогами и относится к планированию с пренебрежением. Плохие дороги на окраинах Москвы препятствуют высокому уровню субурбанизации, поездки выходного дня затруднены и гражданская мобильность в целом ограничена. Если рассматривать Москву снаружи, становится более понятно, как город определяется мобильностью. Мобильность (или, напротив, — остановки) — это и есть сам город; контролируя мобильность — контролируешь город. — Тео Дойтингер, Сергей Чернов
and in common language, these roads are considered to be ‘highways’ but compared with international standards, one would simply call them ‘roads’. Traffic lights and pedestrian crossings are frequent, speed restrictions occur every 10–15 km whenever the road passes through a village, and separate freeways of more than one lane per direction are virtually non-existent. One could say that Russia will catch up, will develop a highway system of international standard in due time. Yet there is also the possibility that Russia deliberately refuses to work on its road system and is planning through negligence. Bad roads in the outskirts keep Moscow rather compact and prevent large scale suburbanization, weekend visits are reduced to a minimum, and civil mobility in general is naturally restricted. Seeing Moscow from the outside, from the countryside, it becomes ever clearer how a city is defined by mobility. Mobility (or its antonym — “stops”) is the city itself; being in control of mobility is being in control of the city. — Theo Deutinger, Sergey Chernov
This book is designed for personal, non-commercial use. You must not use it in any other way, and, except as permitted under applicable law, you must not copy, translate, publish, licence or sell the book without the consent of Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design.
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Table of Contents
Theo Deutinger: The City, the Automobile, and the Residents wrummmmwrummmmwrummmmwrummmmwrummmmwrummmmwrummmmwr P. 22 Mikhail Blinkin: City Transport Strategies: History and Evident Conclusions for Moscow wrummmmwrummmmwrummmmwrummmmwr P. 26
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Night Race
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Behind Moscow
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Glossary wrummmmwrummmmwrummmmwrummmmwrummmmwrummmmwrummmmwrummmmwrummmmwr P. 181
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Historic Growth 1935 dddddd P. 192 Historic Growth 1980 dddddd P. 193 Metro In The Physical Space of The City 2014dddddddddddddd P. 194 Future ddddddddddddddddddddd P. 195 Future Territory And Parks ddddddddddddddddd P. 196 Park And Ride ddddddddddddddP. 197 People’s Garage ddddddddddd P. 198 Police Control Map dddddddd P. 199 Pedestrian Crossingsdddddd P. 200 Garages with Individual
Boxes 2014 dddddddddddddddd P. 201 Monasteries As Defense Outposts dddddddddddddddddd P. 202 Density of Crossings by Districts dddddddddddddddd P. 203 Car-related Services dddddd P. 204 Petrol Stations Logo ddddddd P. 205 Car Dealers Logo dddddddddd P. 206 Megastores Logodddddddddd P. 207
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The City, the Automobile, and the Residents This book summarizes the results of a research studio at the Strelka Institute for Architecture, Media, and Design in the spring of 2014. The primary focus of the studio and subsequently this book has been to discover and show explicitly the intrinsic relationship between people, the car, and the city of Moscow. The newly gained insights are reinterpreted as alternative, Moscow-specific, realities.
by Theo Deutinger 22
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The City, the Automobile, and the Residents
Foreword
The most striking finding exposes the car infrastructure as a magnifier of the struggle between the individual and the collective, the unplanned and the planned, the controlled and the controller. To drivers, the car seems to be a kind of “freedom-machine”, which enables people to accelerate their liberty and power. This intoxicating mixture provides a choice between attack and escape: to attack or escape the law, the rules, and the city. In a city like Moscow, inhabited by people with an extreme desire for personal freedom and ruled with extreme political power, the clash between individual freedom and collective power becomes highly visible. In the following chapters, the virtues of a life with and without this “freedom-machine” will be revealed.
Please note: For Muscovites the car is a very new addition to their lives, which is why car ownership is something beyond question and car-sharing services are virtually nonexistent. Paradoxically, Moscow is also at the forefront of public transportation among European cities due to its magnificent Metro infrastructure, which continues to grow in response to Moscow’s massive automobile traffic jams.
What is unique about the city’s urban routines by car and by other forms of mobility? How can studying routines help us to reinterpret the city or to imagine a future for Moscow that is specific to its own unique conditions rather than simply adopting international standards and predictable strategies? Introduction Nothing changed the modern city as drastically as the arrival of the car. In fact, with the introduction of the car to the city, the modern city was born. Compared to other cities, this arrival happened in Moscow with a considerable delay. Yet the city has caught up within a decade and Moscow’s current car ownership rate is on the same level as that of Paris. Today, traffic jams are the most visible signs of Moscow’s successful mass auto-mobilization. The explosive growth of road-related services and the high social status of car ownership underpin its immense economic and cultural impact. The Freedom Machine Le Corbusier loved to place cars in front of his buildings when they were being photographed to emphasize his statement that buildings are machines for living. Today, architects have trouble getting rid of all the cars in front of their buildings to take decent pictures of their masterpieces. Cars have shifted from being a luxury good to being a just
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another commodity and their usage has shifted from the excitement of driving to the normalcy of routine. Looking for a parking space, being stuck in a traffic jam, and refilling the gas tank are among the most mundane happenings in the world for car users. Despite the delays and inconvenience of Moscow’s mind-boggling traffic jams, car ownership enjoys a high status here, unparalleled in any other country. There is something indescribable about the ability to accelerate, something beyond the technical specifications, that makes people feel a sense of boundless freedom. Already the bicycle, as low as its speed might be, instigated a feeling of liberation and was recognized by 19th-century feminists and suffragists as a “freedom machine” for women. American Susan B. Anthony said in a New York World interview on the 2nd February 1896: “I think it has done more to emancipate woman than any one thing in the world. I rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel. It gives her a feeling of self-reliance and independence the moment she takes her seat; and away she goes, the picture of untrammeled womanhood.” The impact of the introduction of the car cannot therefore be limited to urban design or economics; the car has to be recognized as an important element in the national democratization process. Though traffic jams dampen the feelings of joy and magnitude of freedom, Moscow experienced this democratization process rather late and so the memory is still strong of times before such individual mobility and individual freedom. Muscovites enjoy the freedom of working in the city and living in the countryside, of going on vacation wherever they please, and of shopping on the other side of the city. The car seems not only to accelerate people but also to accelerate changes throughout the city. It forces local politicians to plan, forces entrepreneurs to address traffic flows, and forces drivers to organize with and against each other. Today, the relationship between the car, Moscow, and its citizens is in a state of transition, perhaps on the brink of crisis. We are at a point at which personal freedom is becoming restricted by the individual freedom of others ,and sometimes even by the state. According to Andrei Sharonov, Deputy Mayor of Moscow, “The city’s current road plan was laid out 50 to 60 years ago and was based on a car ownership rate of three vehicles per 100 people. Car usage has grown rapidly in Moscow and now stands at 38 vehicles per 100 people.” Asymmetric Planning With the motorization of society, car-related functions start to appear throughout the city. This reinforces and therefore stimulates car usage. Yet Moscow’s specific political and cultural landscape will prevent development that simply imitates other European cities; most likely, Moscow will find its own Moscow-specific expressions. In order achieve Mayor Sobyanin’s ambition for Moscow to really be a metropolis and a world-class city comparable to London or Paris, one needs to work within the Russian-specific context. This currently entails a situation where night transport is
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The City, the Automobile, and the Residents
Foreword
served predominantly by illegal taxis, where roads used by the President are in better shape than other roads, and where most of the cheap labor is done by unregistered immigrants who live in former automobile garages. Asymmetry is part of the daily routine; since the car is a mobile private space within the public domain, the larger the differences within a society, the higher the degree of asymmetry. In a city like Moscow, where the poor and the rich live extremely separate and different lives, the streets and highways are spaces of confrontation where these different lifestyles can collide. The powerful are confronted with the weak, the rich with the poor, and the fast with the slow. A studio road trip to Kazan unveiled the nature of Moscow’s unique island condition in terms of Russian road infrastructure. A few kilometers beyond the MKAD, Moscow’s largest urban ring road and municipal border, high-quality asphalt soon comes to an end and the road becomes perforated by potholes. Officially and in common language, these roads are considered to be ‘highways’ but compared with international standards, one would simply call them ‘roads’. Traffic lights and pedestrian crossings are frequent, speed restrictions occur every 10-15 km whenever the road passes through a village, and separate freeways of more than one lane per direction are virtually non-existent. One could say that Russia will catch up, will develop a highway system of international standard in due time. Yet there is also the possibility that Russia deliberately refuses to work on its road system and is planning through negligence. Bad roads in the outskirts keep Moscow rather compact and prevent large scale suburbanization, weekend visits are reduced to a minimum, and civil mobility in general is naturally restricted. Seeing Moscow from the outside, from the countryside, it becomes ever clearer how a city is defined by mobility. Mobility (or its antonym — “stops”) is the city itself; being in control of mobility is being in control of the city.
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The history of the city’s coexistence with mass-produced automobiles began in 1908 with the assembly line production of the first Ford Model T. The search for adequate strategies for adapting the city to the impact of mass automobilization, or on the contrary, adapting the aggregate transportation behavior of citizens to the city’s existing potential for mobility has been ongoing ever since then, continuously for more than one hundred years.
City Transport Strategies: History and Evident Conclusions for Moscow
by Professor at Higher 26
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Mikhail Blinkin School of Economics
City Transport Strategies: History and Evident Conclusions for Moscow
Key Essay
The theoretical concepts and field experiments are divided into two main categories:
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Establishing a sufficient supply of spatial resources necessary for the growing number of car journeys; in other words, the adaptation of city fabric to the domination of car mobility. Reducing the demand for car journeys; in other words — discouraging the use of private cars for the benefit of improving the built environment and according to the principles of “nondestructive mobility”.1
Expanding Supply The author of the most ambitious and relatively successful experiment on the complete adaption of the city to the mass car was Robert Moses.2 The experiment was conducted during the continuous growth of annual private car mileage that occurred in American cities every year since 1908. The core of the experiment corresponded to the “common sense” of the city administrator and civil engineer: as private car mileage grows, it is necessary to expand the space of the street and road network in order to accommodate this growth. A well-known car apocrypha says: “Henry Ford gave Americans cars and Robert Moses gave car drivers the cities”. The final results of this grand and highly expensive experiment have been reexamined in recent years. Here is an approximate list of the findings: From a physical point of view (i.e. engineering and planning), the city is capable of adapting to a level of automobilization up to 800 – 900 units per 1000 inhabitants. In other words, the city is able to accommodate a number of cars comparable to the size of population and the cars will still maintain a socially-acceptable driving speed. From a socio-political point of view, the key condition of such adaptation lies in the public agreement of citizens to live in a car-oriented city. Under the conditions of such public agreement, the basic parameters of settlement, land use, planning, and housing must support car dependency. From an engineering point of view, the key condition for adapting the city to cars lies in the development of a dense multi-connected street and road network that would take up 30–35% of the city’s land area. The network has to be stratified with strict distinctions between streets (which feature sidewalks, pedestrians, frequent traffic lights, and are often adjacent to dwellings) and highways, which are separated from the dwelling areas.
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This is sometimes referred to as the principle of “sustainable mobility” which defines the typology and quality range of citizen mobility that the city is able to withstand or sustain without decreasing the comfort of the built environment, visual appearance, cultural identity and ecological safety. The idea of “Sustainable mobility” was first proposed by Western urbanists in the 1980s; nowadays it is already in use by urban communities in progressive cities around the world. The traditional Russian equivalent of “ustoychevaya mobilnost” (sustainable mobility) gives a distorted definition; the more correct definition is “nerazrushaushaya mobilnost” (nondestructive mobility). Robert Moses (1888–1981) — American civil engineer and city manager, formed the face of the modern New York City and made a decisive influence on the development of urban planning in the United States in 1920–1970.
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The settlement parameters and road network parameters outlined above bring forward an important empirical norm: according to Robert Moses’s city planning, each car needs 150–200 square meters of communal paved territory. The third condition is the confirmation of a not-so-pleasant axiom: “Highway users must pay their way”. The vast and well-planned space for driving cars in cities built according to Robert Moses must be paid not by the state, but by the car users’ taxes included in the price of fuel. A city that would live in such an experiment for 50–80 years would become caroriented by default. This city can function, but it cannot respond to the modern criteria of “a city comfortable for living” as there will be a lack of public spaces and suitable pedestrian environment. Reducing Demand Contrary to the idea of expanding supply, conceived and firmly established on the “common sense” level, the idea of reducing demand for driving cars has a “more honourable scientific origin. The theoretical groundwork for this idea was first outlined by the noted American economist William Vickrey and was published 50 years ago.3 The solution proposed by William Vickrey lies in a system of payments for using street and road networks that is differentiated by time and location (“Marginal Cost Road Pricing”)4: the more traffic load there is in a particular place, at a particular time of day, the more the user must pay. Vickrey assumed that such payments would allow many road construction projects to be abandoned, because the car drivers facing new payments—which show the true cost of such projects—would switch to public transportation or car pools5. Those who are going to enjoy roads without traffic would have to pay a fair price. In order to realize this mechanism in practice (later called Vickrey’s Toll), the author brought forth an idea that in 1963 was thought to be futuristic: to equip all cars with electronic ID’s that carry monetary value. Later, Vickrey’s ideas laid the foundation for another more radical field experiment on reducing car use in Singapore, initiated by legendary mayor Lee Kwan Yew. Although Singapore has many advantages, it is a very dense city; the street and road network accounts for only 11% of the city area, which is slightly higher than in Moscow, but three times lower than in any North American city.
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William S. Vickrey (1914–1996) — Nobel Prize Laureate for Economics in 1996, the author of one of the most famous works in the history of transport economics: “Pricing in Urban and Suburban Transport.” American Economic Review 52, 1963, no. 2: 452–465. “Road pricing” in this context means the pricing of road construction. Therefore, to avoid confusion, one has to use longer definitions such as “pricing for road use” or “pricing policy for road use”. Car Pool — the collective use of cars for daily labor trips “periphery — center.” Such car behavior leads to a reduction in the number of cars carrying one person (Single Occupancy Vehicle, SOV) and, consequently, increases the number of cars with greater cabin load (High Occupancy Vehicle, HOV). The practice of the collective use of cars is encouraged by the city authorities by allocating separate lanes on city freeways marked with signs “HOVlane” or “2 +”.
City Transport Strategies: History and Evident Conclusions for Moscow
Key Essay
Singapore has done everything possible to adapt the city to cars within its condition of limited space. Specifically, the network structure completely corresponds with American planning standards and practice: there are no hybrid constructions (streets and freeways are separated). For any future massive road construction projects, there would always be ways to find financing but never ways to find more physical space. Subsequently, a system of strict limitations on owning and using cars was established. This approach assumes an absolute and broad public agreement. A strict growth quota for the number of cars was introduced, aimed at artificially maintaining the level of automobilization to be no higher than 200 cars per 1000 inhabitants. In practice, this quota is implemented through regular auctions for the right to purchase a car. Based on the 2013 auction price of the voucher, purchasing a car was a staggering three times as high as the price of the same car in a showroom. The defined quota has a clear physical implication: with strict compliance to their rules, one Singapore car accounts for about 75 square meters of paved public space. Of course, it is far below Los Angeles, but much higher than in Moscow, Kazan, or in Johannesburg. In order to further reduce the demand for purchasing cars, a series of high excise rates and a registration fee were introduced. In comparison, in cities such as Tokyo or Shanghai, the key condition for registering a car and receiving a license plate is having a legal space to store your car at night. Finally, for the first time in the history of the world, Singapore implemented Vickrey’s idea to the fullest: a system of online payments for the use of street and road networks was introduced (electronic road pricing) which would be dynamically determined by traffic load. The demand for using cars was further reduced by designing one of the world’s best public transportation systems, including modern high-speed trains, efficient taxi systems, and Car Sharing6. Mixed Strategies In practice, the “pure” strategies described above — expanding supply and reducing demand — have been used together in different proportions relative to one another, according to the city’s position in world automobilization levels and of course to national urban planning and fiscal traditions.
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Car Sharing — a club model for cooperative car use. Members can take and must return a car to special parking areas. Each member has a key-card. When the ignition is switched on, the club computer checks the payment status of the client and whether there has been an advance booking made at this time. If the answer to both questions is positive, the car starts. Assessments made by analysts from The Economist magazine, show that the mechanism of car sharing can drastically reduce the level of automobilization: one “club” car can replace up to 15 private cars.
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The British transport policy of the 1960s followed the first proposal for establishing a sufficient supply. The idea was called “Predict and Provide”, meaning that supply (based on the capacity of the street and road networks) would be provided that is enough to satisfy the calculated demand for car journeys. In 1964, professor Reuben Smeed7 presented a report to the Prime Minister which said: “…in order to increase the national welfare, it is recommended to implement road pricing, in spite of the common belief that roads are goods of public use.” Later on, a document signed by Prime Minister Sir Alec Douglas Home was found in the Ministry of Transport which stated the following: “…let us take a vow that if we are re-elected we will never again set up a study like this one”.8 Thus, the idea of reducing demand was received with dread and bewilderment by the political elite of the United Kingdom in the 1960s. Likewise, for American politicians, the idea of reducing demand was deemed absurd. It took many years and many millions of hours wasted in traffic before the expert elite (and then the political elite) finally understood the “revolutionary” idea:
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Highways and cars are an indisputable benefit for realization of inter-city and inter-regional transportation; The car isn’t always necessary (and sometimes is even harmful!) for city and inter-agglomerative transportation.
British professor Phil Goodwin was one of the brightest representatives of the expert elite who “brought in the verdict” on the ideology of adapting cities to cars. Here are the hallmark quotes from his inaugural lecture given in 1997 before stepping into the position of Professor of Transport Policy at University College London (UCL):
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“…we built roads (increasing thereby the budget expenditure, losing votes, causing damage to the economy and environment …), but we could never come to a balance between supply and demand for road capacity. It seems that we shouldn’t do it.”; “…we do our children no favours if we confine them to a car-dependent mobility. And I think our grandchildren will wonder what took us so long.”9
Nowadays, the need to free cities from car dependence has become a common goal in all developed countries around the world. At the same time, the once highly popular discussion concerning the speed and scale of city road construction has stopped; people are no longer debating which of the two strategies (“Estimate and Provide”, or “Predict and Provide”) is more correct—It became clear that neither is. The most safe 7 8 9
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Reuben Jacob Smeed (1909–1976) — one of the most reputable transport scientists of the 20th century. He was the first professor of transport studies in history at University College London (UCL) Quote by Phil Goodwin. Solving congestion. Inaugural Lecture for the Professorship of Transport Policy, University College London, 1997. Phil Goodwin. Solving congestion. Inaugural Lecture for the Professorship of Transport Policy, University College London, 1997.
City Transport Strategies: History and Evident Conclusions for Moscow
Key Essay
and rich cities of the world are following a new trend which 10–15 years ago would have been thought unbelievable: the mass demolition of multi-level junctions and overpasses constructed half a century ago in the city centers. The most evident quantitative response to these new tendencies is the collapse of the century-rising course of automobilization. For example, in Milan, once the most car-driven city in Europe, the turning point came in 1990: on average, 1000 Milanese had more than 700 cars, which is 8 times more than in Moscow at that time. Today Milan is on the “500” mark against Moscow’s “400”. If the trends which have developed in our cities remain, in a couple of years we will certainly overtake the proud Italians. Let’s sum up the results. The ideology of “expanding supply” has become the domain of transport and urban history. In contrast, the ideology of “reducing demand” is recognized as the best and most useful strategy around the world. In the majority of cities in the developed part of the world, the spatial resources which are providing for car journeys is decreasing, giving way to modern systems of public transportation, pedestrian zones, and bicycle infrastructure. Conclusions for Moscow Addressing domestic realities, I will note that Moscow has no chances to experiment in the spirit of Robert Moses’s strategy because we have an 80-year time lag from when western countries began their automobilization. I have no doubts that Moscow city managers are no less passionate and persevering than their classic transoceanic colleague Mr. Moses. The trouble is that Moscow will never be able to find the land and financial resources that would be necessary for creating a car-oriented city. Today, no more than 10% of Moscow’s urban area is made up of street and road network. The only way to reach the standard 30–35% would be to start the mass demolition of old housing and reduce the green field area, but I can hardly imagine a politician who would stand for such a plan. As for our own attempts at reconstruction of “outbound highways”, or construction of transport corridors traced directly along old Moscow streets, they correspond to Robert Moses’s plans approximately in the same way as the needlework of Ellochka the Cannibal10 corresponds with the fashionable acquisitions of the Vanderbilt family11. I will add that less than 25% of the grand investments into Moscow road construction projects circa 2012–2013 were paid by Moscow car drivers (through a petrol excise and a car tax). The other funding came from the general budget; it is evident that in the conditions of the forthcoming decrease of the national budget, less and less will be allocated for road construction. In these conditions, we won’t get anywhere near accomplishing something akin to Moses’s plan. 10 Ellochka the Canninbal is character in the satirical novel by Ilya Ilf and Yevgeni Petrov “The Twelve Chairs” (Editor’s note). 11 The Vanderbilt family is an American family that was prominent during the Gilded Age, whose wealth expanded into various areas of industry and philanthropy (Editor’s note).
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About 25 square meters of paved public area accounts for one Moscow car today. The ambitious aim to double this standard would cost the city (in the current prices of construction) about 70 billion dollars. Meanwhile, even 50 square meters per 1 car is not nearly enough to improve the city’s conditions for mobility; simply put, this shift wouldn’t even be noticed by the majority of car drivers. The tough conclusion for many drivers is that unlike the Russian periphery, big-scale road construction projects are not advisable for Moscow. Of course, the capital should use the obvious therapeutic methods at its disposal, such as increasing the density and connectivity of the road network within the “bagel” of panel housing between the Third Transport Road and MKAD (Moscow ring highway) and thereby increasing the appeal of this territory This would also reduce excess mileage and reduce reliance on the city center for transportation functions. In all the rest of Moscow, we should take the path of reducing demand for car use and expand public transportation, closely following not just the German, but better yet the Singapore methods. What kind of obstacles might we encounter?
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First—mental: The vast majority of Muscovites, including chief urban planners and engineers, believe in the arrival of a bright car-driven future along with massive road construction. This belief is strong and will not be swayed by any technical arguments to the contrary. Second—socio-political: The methods of the administrative and fiscal plan for reducing demand for car use are unpopular. As was already noted above, such measures will only be accepted by society under one indispensable condition: the total universality of these measures.
From this perspective, there is a rather exotic (compared to world practice) problem, related to the overall fleet of cars in Moscow, which is strikingly different from all foreign analogues. There are two main clusters of cars in Moscow that are impervious to any kind of regulatory influence used in international practice. The first one consists of official and personal cars that are daily and intensively operated with hired drivers. The second non-standard cluster (which often overlaps with the first) consists of the cars of privileged users listed in administrative regulations of the traffic police. The total number of cars in both clusters amounts to no less than 200 thousand units, which is about 5% of the total number of cars in Moscow, according to the most conventional calculations. However, owing to obvious circumstances of exploitation, the density of these clusters in daily city traffic (and, especially, traffic in the city center) is much higher.
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City Transport Strategies: History and Evident Conclusions for Moscow
Key Essay
I believe that in the foreseeable future, the city won’t be able to abandon the overuse of privilege in traffic and parking, despite how these privileges are provided not to kings and presidents but to numerous and quite ordinary “privileged users”. Overcoming the two described obstacles, mental and socio-political, is possible in two ways described by Denos Gazis12 . This remarkable American scientist once wrote that the cities solve their transport problems the same way people learn how to use electrical equipment: you can either read the manual, or you can touch the bare wire. Gazis had reason to believe that cities practice the second way much more often. Moscow is on a path toward solving its transport problems, through lots of trial and error. Moscow isn’t the best city by far but is definitely not the worst. Waiting for miracles is futile. We simply need to learn—and in one way or another, we will learn.
12 Denos C. Gazis (1930–2004) — American scientist in the field of applied mathematics, operations research, the history of Greek philosophy. Supervised transport projects at IBM Research Center for over 20 years. Author of the concept of Intelligent Transportation System (ITS).
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DR I V E! 35
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Section A
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1
State of The Road
2
Mkad City
3
The Car is the Medium
Pocket Article: Moscow-2
Pocket Article: Exit MKAD
Pocket Article: How To Wear Kit Look
Moscow’s ring roads have origins as key elements in the city’s defense system. Today, in times of weak communal defense mechanisms due to ‘inside strangers’, the car has partly taken on the task of protection. Consequently, cars are operating like individual, private space ships. However, lingering problems, from technical to democratic, make drivers realize the potential and necessity of unity. Eventually this could lead to a new democratic movement. The largest element of municipal Moscow’s system of concentric ring roads is the MKAD. This ring that initially was designed as a circulation road changed throughout the past 20 years into a densely-packed strip of destinations which potentially could become a city itself, circling the old city. The MKAD and other major roads in Moscow are cluttered with advertisements competing for the drivers’ attention, while digital media is conquering more and more terrain inside the car. However, the car always has been a medium itself by extending the driver’s body; in fact, driver and car are continually merging more and more together into a kind of Frankenstein.
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State of The Road Humans Need Defense Humans are unprotected creatures by nature. Hence, humans surround themselves with defensive technology. Everything created by humans, from clothes to state borders, are in fact tools for protecting themselves from their dangerous environment. by Olena Grankina
According to the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, the autocratic state was invented by humans as a tool of defense. In his most known work “Leviathan”, written at the time of English civil war (1642-1651), Hobbes argues that “war” is a “natural state” for humans, combining three main natural features: competition, distrust and hunger for glory. Because of these features, humans have a latent tendency to make war. In order to avoid war, humans need to create the state as an institution, which restrains the individual through rules and laws, according to Hobbes. Subsequently the main purpose of the State is to provide safety for its citizens. Following Hobbes’ theory that the State is “Leviathan”—, an autocratic monster, created by humans to defend themselves; a monster that reveals human features — it must have the same desire for “competition”, “distrust” and “hunger for glory”. This would explain the existence of inter-state wars. Leviathan, the humanoid monster that consists of individual humans, has to deal with two tasks. First, to keep a tight rein on humans inside the State to prevent them from fighting each other; second, to defend itself from external danger, based on inter-state (multistate) competition and distrust. This observation explains two types of defense system and two types of enemy: “the outside enemy”, which means the fight against the danger outside; and “the inside enemy”, which means restraining each individual by rules and law.
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State of The Road
Main Article
Outside Enemy City walls are the very first primitive defense system the state provided to defend itself from external enemies. Moscow’s first walls appeared in the XII century, represented by wooden walls around a little roadside working settlement. This was the time of citystates. Wars happened often and at random, and neighbors fought with neighbors. Each small city defended itself with its walls. Roads between cities were developed along lines of attack and offense as well as for the reason of trade. In the XIII century, when Moscow rapidly gained power, its defense system improved. From the very center, the Kremlin, roads have been built to monasteries located around the city. They were outposts that enabled Moscow’s empowerment and growth through providing safety. → [see fig. 1]
This concept was later adapted to the centralized state of the Russian Empire. The monasteries around Moscow were exchanged for fortresses in Kiev, Baku, St. Petersburg, Riga and elsewhere, and what had once been a tool for offense was turned into a tool for defense. To have more land meant to be more secure. Roads were expanded hundreds kilometers west, south, east and north, aiming for a construction of fortress outposts as far from the empire’s heart as possible. → [see fig. 2]
The fortress lost its meaning with the invention of new weaponry: starting with artillery and later aircraft and atomic bomb. In 1911 the Russian garrison artillery, whose task was to defend the walls, was abolished. → [see fig. 3]
City walls were gradually disappearing only to come back in the form of road infrastructure. Old “Belgorodskaya” and “Zemlyanaya”1 walls in Moscow turned into the Boulvard Ring and the Garden Ring. In the XX century, road network became a core element of the State defense strategy. → [see fig. 4]
In the Soviet Union the secret police, KGB, were put in charge of road building since roads were considered a strategic tool in warfare. Road building parameters were based on tanks, but not on small Soviet cars. Out of strategic considerations, roads were often disguised on the map. Two new ring roads, constructed in the Moscow region in the 1950s and connecting anti-ballistic missile objects, were not shown on the civic map until 1980. It also became important to know the road network of the enemy, as roads are first of all the means for evacuation and movement of troops. Thus, the Soviet government started a huge “World mapping” program, aiming to have each city road network on the table. Western cities were mapped in the scale 1:10000 or 1:20000 with an unprecedented detailed classification of the roads. There are many diverse types of road to be found, such as “road with or without fence”, “ground road”, “dirty road”, or “concrete road”.
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Belgorodskaya wall surrounded the city since the end of XVI century, Eart wall was built in the XVII century as a result of expanding of the city. Both were demolished in XIX cent to be transformed into the ring city boulvards.
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Politics of Real Time The importance of the road in the XX century as a part of defense strategy can be explained by the global shift in world politics. Paul Virilio described the governance of the XX century as a “politics of real time”. He argued that weapons, being developed enormous scale, devalued the meaning of space. The ability of nuclear bombs to destroy entire cities, countries or the planet made the question “how far?” meaningless, while the question “how fast?” became of utmost importance. In order to win the fight, the state needed to be quick, to be the first, and to be on time. Major parameters have become: how fast is it possible to attack How fast is it possible to take defense? How many minutes are needed to evacuate an urban centre? How many seconds are needed to evacuate the government? Speed became a key point. Roads provided the means for speed. The “speed” concept embraced inter-state relationships in general. The Soviet Union put all its technological resources into being first country in space, claiming in this way its power on space itself. → [see fig. 5]
Originally, the word “speed” came from “to succeed”. Speed: from Old English sped “success, a successful course; prosperity, riches, wealth; luck; opportunity, advancement” from Old Saxon spodian “to cause to succeed”2 To be faster became just as important inside the State. Initially it came from the speed concept of weaponry and was later introduced in everyday life. The concept of “speed” in people’s daily routine has been reflected in the world’s growing car ownership. The car allowed people to speed, to succeed. → [see fig. 6]
The individual’s success is a stranger to the autocratic state and the state tends to control this success, reinforcing the control on citizens inside the borders. As soon as the car entered the city, the control of “speed” inside the State became necessary. Inside Enemy Stalin asked engineers of his own car to make it 20 horsepower faster than for other possible owners. However, understanding that the car is a potential tool for incrasing an individual’s space and time, the Soviet Union applied a more successful way to control speed, through simply restricting car ownership in general. By the end of the Soviet Union, there were only 560.000 car owners, thanks to the political oppression of the Soviet regime. To control the 60.000 km of the Soviet border would have seemed impossible if citizens had cars. The period when N. Khrushchev was the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1953–1964) was marked by the political statement “the roads are not needed”. “I refuse to invest people’s money in roads,”3 claimed 2 3
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Online Etymology Dictionary http://www.etymonline.com/ Cars for Comrades. The Life of the Soviet Automobile, Lewis H. Siegelbaum
State of The Road
Main Article
N. Khrushchev. Even if someone had a car, there were no roads to drive on. The lack of roads completed citizens’ imprisonment. As soon as the Soviet Union collapsed, car ownership rates “broke the speed control”. In 10 years, the amount of cars in Russia increased four-fold. The car enabled people to choose their own space and to control their own time. → [see fig. 7]
Together with growing car ownership, the state reinforced the system of speed control by the police. Not being able to restrict “speed” in general, the State controls it. Similar to the named e-ticket system for air and train connections, which allows the control of each movement inside the State, car number plates allow control of individual traffic movement. The system of radars, cameras and police posts on the road are not only for road safety, but also for controlling the space by monitoring each car that goes in, goes through or goes out. Each crossing of a radial road with the MKAD in Moscow is under the police control. → [see fig. 8]
The fact that the police posts are represented physically in buildings turns them into permanent outposts, like the monasteries around the city. The architectural typology of Moscow’s police control posts is similar to that of an ancient watchtower, with the only but major difference being that it is oriented inside the city. → [see fig. 9]
The “Inside” itself becomes more and more dangerous in the context of a globalized world and the development of world-spanning networks. Today the danger comes from inside, because there is no “outside anymore”. “Who can deny, that in its primary aspects, the western world [...] embodies such a great interior today?” This is how Peter Sloterdejk4 sees the world, as an endless Paxton palace with all its danger and diseases. Moscow is a perfect case study in the context of a dangerous urban environment. It is the city in which, in the past 18 years, 23 terroristic attacks have taken place. The police force, which ought to provide safety in such an environment, is commonly met with distrust, and turns against its etymological roots: the word “police” comes from the Greek “polis” [city], which in Latin transformed into the “policy” as “city administration” and in the middle ages in French into the “police” as “to keep in order”. The word “police” distanced itself from “polis”, and the police as an institution has distanced itself from citizens. The level of police control in Moscow is very high in comparison to other cities. There is one policeman per hundred citizens, while in Paris the ratio is one to 500. But the level of trust in the police amongst Muscovites is lower than average, since less than half believe in the police institution. The feeling of distrust is reinforced by the gradual militarization of the police. After the terroristic attacks in Volgograd in 2013, the Russian government started a program of safety precautions in transport, part of which is the education of Russian police by Israeli colleagues5. This can provoke a new method for keeping order in the city, which is, according to Israeli politics, very similar to the violent manner used by the army. → [see fig. 10] 4 5
Peter Sloterdijk “In the Interior of the capital”, Wiley-Blackwell, 2013 According to … Israel police is the most militarized police in the world, which exports the method of control on the city in USA, Kenia, Nigeria, India
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In such a dangerous environment, the car is the perfect tool for individual defense in a public space. “The car is defending from the fear. Radically ignoring their wider surroundings, cars [...] become, in the process what De Cauter calls ‘capsules on networks’.”6 In the context of aggressiveness, the car is transforming from a mechanical horse for speed into a knight for fighting. → [see fig. 13, 14]
Resistance to The City The extreme growth of car ownership, together with the resistance to an aggressive environment, has helped to develop a very Moscow-specific and rapidly growing car society. The first car clubs in Russia appeared at the end of 1990s but developed very fast and, within 10 years, a big car movement has emerged. → [see fig. 15]
The original reason for founding a car club was the lack of information about the car itself in the context of late automobilization in Russia. The absence of car dealers encouraged people to come together in order to share information at spontaneous car parts markets in Moscow. As soon as official dealers appeared in Moscow, the process of car shopping and maintaining became easier. Already united, car owners turned to the questions of car and road infrastructure. The struggle for better car infrastructure started out with the fight against potholes and the evaluation of road interchanges. → [see fig. 16]
Large and established car communities were able to fight for drivers’ rights, interacting directly with governmental structures. The high level of danger on the roads gave reason to fight for driver’s rights both in the context of crime and distrust of state institutions. The car organizations found their most powerful tool for controlling police violence and drivers’ rights was the dashboard camera, which has been imported to Russia thanks to its active car community. In Russia, more than 3 million cameras have been sold from 2011 to 2013. Today every third driver in Moscow has a dashboard camera, enabling him to shoot each accident and defend his rights in court. The next step for car communities is the fight for citizens’ rights. In 2010–2011, the car communities of Moscow organized a protest movement that promoted honest presidential elections. Hundreds of cars were driven through Garden Ring to promote their right to vote. In their aim, drivers are very ambitious. “My aim is to create civic society in Russia”, - says Vadim Korovin, former member of the Car Owner’s Federation. Together with the heads of Moscow’s biggest car clubs, he is currently working on a community scheme, which is based on car clubs and, with the help of independent experts, has to influence the political processes in the city. Such a community can potentially grow into a powerful political arm for civic control, similar to ADAC7 in Germany. This means that the car society can become a civic representative to be considered by government not only in transport and driver’s questions but also in politics. If the latter 6 7
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Stephen Graham “Cities under siege. The new military urbanism”, Verso 2011 ADAC - Allgemeiner Deutscher Automobil-Club, found in 1903 and counts 8 million of members
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doesn’t happen, the car army can explode with a fight similar to the Automaidan protest on wheels, which took place in Ukraine during the revolution in 2013/2014. In this fight the car fully unfolds its knight’s sense and forces the State to be afraid of it.8 Despite the fact that the car is foremost an individual’s defense shield, it has the power to transcend to the next level. Creating a common car army, together drivers can challenge the State. → [see fig. 17]
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During the protest against the government in Ukraine, car movement played a great role blocking the road infrastructure on the governmental way, creating the transport infrastructure for rebels. In reply, the government passed the law, which limited the movement of more than five car in the row.
References: 1. 2. 3. 4.
5. 6. 7. 8. 9.
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18. 19.
Andrew Garnar, “Portable Civilizations and Urban Assault Vehicles”, Virginia Tech, Vol 11, no. 1 (Fall 2007) Archis Volume #11: Cities Unbuilt, Publisher Stichting Archis, May, 2007 Archis Volume #26: Architecture of Peace, Publisher Stichting Archis, December 2010 Ben Highmore, “The everyday life reader”. Available online: http:// lcst3789.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/highmore-the-everydaylife-reader.pdf Chris McNab, “A history of the world in 100 weapons”, Osprey publishing, 2011 Dimitris Dalakoglou, The road: An ethnography of the Albanian– Greek cross-border motorway, University of Sussex. George Monbiot, “Driving into the abyss”, The guardian, Tuesday 6 July 2004 Henri Lefebvre, “Critique of everyday life”, volume 1, translated by John Moore, Verso, 1991 Jeremy Packer, Automobility and the driving force of warfare: From public safety to national security, Conference lectured at the Symposium „Architectures of fear. Terrorism and the Future of Urbanism in the West“ CCCB 17-18 May 2007. Available online: http://www.publicspace.org/es/texto-biblioteca/eng/b032-automobility-and-the-driving-force-of-warfare-from-public-safety-to-national-security Jeremy Packer, “Mobility without Mayhem. Safety, cars and citizenship”, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2008 John Urry, “Inhabiting the car”, published by the department of sociology, Lancaster university, available online: Lancaster at http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/papers/urry-inhabiting-the-car.pdf Kristin Ross, “Fast cars, clean bodies: decolonization and reordering of French culture”, MIT Press, 1995 Lieven De Cauter, “A short Archeology of the new fear”, Open 2004/No. 6/(In)Security Lieven De Cauter, “Capsular Civilization. On the city in the age of fear”, NAi Pub., 2004 Lewis H. Siegelbaum “Cars for comrades. The life of the soviet automobile”, Cornell university, 2008 Michiel Dehaene and Lieven De Cauter, “Heterotopia and the City. Public space in a postcivil society”, Routledge, 2008 Michelle Provoost, “New towns on the Cold War frontier”, the article is part of the research project „The New Town“, published 2006. Available online: http://www.eurozine.com/articles/200606-28-provoost-en.html “Military forces in transition”, p.30-47, US Governmental Printing Office, 1991 “Military operations as urban planning”, By Phillip Misselwitz and Eyal Weizman, 28 August 2003. Available online: http://www.met-
amute.org/editorial/articles/military-operations-urban-planning 20. Paul Virillio, “Speed and politics”, translated by Marc Polizzotti, Semiotext(e), 2006 21. Paul Virillio, “Fahren, Fahren, Fahren…”, Merve Verlag Berlin 22. Peter Sloterdijk “In the interior of the capital”, Wiley-Blackwell, 2013 23. Shane Gunster, “‚You Belong Outside‘: Advertising, Nature, and the SUV”, Ethic and Environment; Fall 2044; 9,2; Research Library, p. 4-32 24. Steffen Böhm, Campbell Jones, Chris Land and Matthew Paterson “Against Automobility”, Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2006 25. Stephen Graham “Cities under siege. The new military urbanism”, Verso 2011 26. “Soviet Topographic Map Symbols”, Headquarters, Department of the Army June 1958 27. Timothy Mitchell “Carbon Democracy, Economy and Society”, 2009, available online: http://dx.doi. org/10.1080/03085140903020598 28. Thomas Hobbes “Leviathan: Or the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill, Yale University Press, 2010 29. , «Поводив хоровод», блог РадиоЭхоМосквы , 29 Ó 2012. Available online: http://echo.msk.ru/blog/b_akunin/853623-echo/ 30. В. В. Косточкин. Государев мастер Федор Конь. М., издательство „Наука“, 1964. 31. В.В. Косточкин. Русское оборонное зодчество конца XIII начала XVI веков. М., Издательство Академии наук, 1962 32. Г.Д. Дубелир, «Грунтовые дороги», Киев, 1914 33. И. Карпюк, «Больше трех авто уже митинг», article at polit. ru, 29/04/ 2010. Available online: http://www.polit.ru/article/2010/04/29/auto/ 34. Захаров, «Парад и пробки или Путин играет Брежнева», article at polit.ru, 27/04/2012. Available online: http://polit.ru/ article/2012/04/27/parad/ 35. Н.Н. Воронин “Московский Кремль (1156-1367 Ó.)”, Материалы и исследования по археологии СССР, №77 (Метательная артиллерия и оборонительные сооружения), 1958 г. стр. 57-66. 36. П.А. Раппопорт, “Древние русские крепости”. М., 1965. 37. Р. Кононенко “Автомобильность а России”, М. : ООО «Вариант», ЦСПГИ, 2011.
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fig. 12: ‘Audi’ advertisement in 2014
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by Olena Grankina
Urban planning during Soviet times meant planning for war. Moscow, at the heart of the Soviet empire and the most defended city, reflects this strategic planning to its full extent. Its broad prospects and boulevards still recall emergency landing runways, while baseless deep metro tunnels recall emergency bomb shelters. Despite the new strategic war concept based on information technology1, Russia has still not moved on from the urban planning of the past, which aims to provide safety for the heart of the empire in case of nuclear war. There are approximately 150 war-strategic objects (offices, polygons, houses) within the border of the city, which are not accessible to citizens. Together with the “strategic” road network, which includes two rings, all main radial roads and special deep subway lines, they create a city within a city, providing a quick and secure means of evacuation for the leadership of Moscow. Additionally there are command posts deep underground in urban Moscow. One is located adjacent to Moscow State University. It is estimated to be 200-300 m deep and can accommodate an estimated 10,000 people. 2 The ground surface above these facilities is covered with garages. Former garage cooperatives constructed in this area, designed not to attract the attention of citizens, have been transformed into a migrants’ ghetto called Shanghai.3 Being a dangerous enclave of the city, Shanghai is the perfect camouflage for what lies underground. The vice president of TransStroy [Transport Construction], the company in charge of transportation construction, met us in his office, housed in one of seven Moscow skyscrapers built in the 1950s. Mr. Sbitnev has worked in the same room for 27 years and has done his best to keep its original interior. “As long as I am alive, I will keep it unchanged.” This position is common for any question we ask, including the main concept of city development.
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The Net-centric warfare based on information technology and robust networking of well-informed geographically dispersed forces information network was first introduced in 1990s by United State Department of Defense and highly used by global state forces to influence the war conflict According to the material published in 1991 in Military Forces in Transition magazine, Washington, USA See project “SHANGHAI MOSCOW” by ELA MAZINA
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… O: “Your organization built the metro in Moscow. Does Metro-2 exist?” Mr. S.: “Yes” O: “Can we see/ have some material on it (schemes etc)?” Mr. S.: “I receive a 25% bonus to my salary because I keep it a secret”4 O: “When was the Metro-2 built?” Mr. S.: “Always, since the very beginning of Soviet Union” E: “I’m researching the garages behind MSU. Is it true that Metro-2 is under these slums?” Mr. S.:”I recommend you not to research it. From 10 to 25 years in a prison.” → [see image below]
E: ... “Thank you” Mr. S.: “And you are asking about this... Tell me; do you want Russia to exist?” E: “Yes” Mr. S.: “THEN WE NEED METRO-2, WE NEED MOSCOW-2! THIS IS THE STATE! THIS THE WAY TO KEEP IT THE STATE!!!”
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There was a salary system in Soviet Union, which provides higher salary for those who dealt with secret materials
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→ [see fig. 1]
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Opened to the public in 1962, the 109km MKAD spent decades as a countryside ring road for redirecting traffic around the city of Moscow. However, after the USSR collapsed, the area around the road started to urbanize rapidly and the ring became more and more congested. Numerous petrol stations, repair shops, mega malls, leisure centers, and offices turned the MKAD ring road into a Post-Soviet City: a place filled with destinations, all connected by the ring and accessible by car.
MKAD Border Road Throughout history, the city of Moscow has experienced a concentric growth, with the Kremlin always at its core. As the city population grew, radial roads that led outside the city were framed by new and increasingly larger concentric borders that added land to the existing city. From the city’s founding in the 12th century until the end of the 19th century, the border of the city was defined by walls and ramparts that defended the city from outside forces. After the invention of mobile artillery in the 18th century, defense walls gradually lost their protective function and were converted into concentric boulevards. In 1960, a new ring became the administrative border of Moscow. This time the border was not a defense structure, but a 109km ring road for redirecting incoming traffic around the city. The ring was called Moskovskaya Koltsevaya Avtomobilnaya Doroga, better known as MKAD. → [see fig. 2, 3]
The MKAD was designed in the second half of the 1930s. However, due to World War II, a simplified road was quickly built in 1941 to transport troops and military equipment. In the mid-1950s, construction started to make the MKAD accessible to the public and in 1962 a completed four-lane MKAD opened. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, plans emerged to improve road safety and future traffic circulation on the MKAD. An upgraded MKAD opened in 1997. The road was enlarged to 10 lanes, all traffic lights were removed, and pedestrian bridges and a concrete barrier were added. Until today, the MKAD ring road is the most important physical and mental border of the city. This ring is the key element that separates Muscovites from people living outside the city. → [see fig. 4]
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From Ring Road To Urban Ring Traffic jams are the principal urban routine for people who regularly drive along the MKAD. Circumventing the MKAD takes on average twice as much time as it should do in free-flowing traffic. This is the irony of the ring road: although built to improve traffic circulation, the MKAD has become a heavily congested ring. A major source of congestion is the urbanization of the land along the MKAD. Nowadays, in a radius of 500 meters around the road, approximately 430 services can be found, including petrol stations, car dealers, car repair shops, shopping malls, megastores, hotels, cinemas, and offices. These ubiquitous services are a contemporary phenomenon. In the first three decades of its existence, the MKAD hosted just a few petrol stations. Only after the collapse of the USSR in 1991 did more and varied services begin to appear along the ring. In particular, after 1997, when the MKAD was enlarged from 4 to 10 lanes, the number of services boomed. → [see fig. 5]
Land politics have influenced the urbanization of the MKAD. Although enlarged after 1984, the administrative border of Moscow still followed the MKAD to a large extent when the boom in services took place. In this period, the adjacent region Moscow Oblast offered lower land prices to project developers. Their new and often large development projects, including IKEAs, large shopping malls and entertainment halls, took place on the outside of the ring. As a result, the city of Moscow grew outside its border. → [see fig. 6]
Surprisingly, many of the services on both the inside and outside of the MKAD are directly connected to the ring. Of its 336 exits in total, 192 exits immediately lead to an enclave hosting different services. This condition is absolutely unique in the world: compared to ring roads in cities like Beijing, Caïro, Paris, and Washington DC, the MKAD on average has 14 times more direct exits per kilometer. These type of exists symbolize the transformation of the MKAD from a road for improving traffic circulation into an urban ring full of destinations. Over the last two decades, the MKAD has become a post-Soviet city. Whereas life in the USSR was characterized by limited choice for consumption and restricted car ownership for the majority of people, MKAD City is all about cars and consumption. An eclectic mix of functions accommodate different lifestyles: the less well-off shop at the cheap Sadovod immigrant market, the middle class is served by IKEA stores and their MEGA shopping malls, and wealthy Muscovites go shopping at the luxurious Crocus City Mall. And everything in the mix is connected through a congested ring. → [see fig. 7, 8, 9, 10]
An Urban Boulevard Moscow continues to grow. The population of Moscow and Moscow Oblast combined is expected to increase from approximately 19 million today to 21.5 million by 2030. The physical size of the city is also growing. In the summer of 2012, New Moscow — an area southwest of the existing city — was added to the city’s administrative border, thereby multiplying the size of Moscow by 2.35. In addition, the 525km CKAD ring road is planned to open in 2025 to redirect incoming traffic around greater Moscow. With these measures, the city appears to continue its concentric growth strategy.
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However, planned development projects in Moscow reveal a different image. New offices and retail centers do not follow the 2012 border extension, nor are they appearing along the new ring road. All development projects are planned within or close to the existing city. Part of these new developments will take place on the MKAD, causing MKAD City to grow further, to attract more traffic, and become increasingly congested. → [see fig. 11]
The MKAD is on the brink. Either it develops into a highway according to international standards, or it embraces its peculiar and unplanned condition. The first strategy requires a top-down approach to improve junctions and seriously reduce the number of exits. In exchange for improved circulation, the accessibility of destinations along the ring will be decreased. An alternative solution seems more fit for the already city-like but heavily congested MKAD; a solution that improves traffic flow and at the same time reinforces the current qualities and ongoing transformation of the MKAD. The MKAD’s future is that of an urban boulevard. In this scenario, two of its current car lanes on both sides are redistributed to modes of public transport. Urban railways and fast buses increase the amount of people using the MKAD by 5 to 6 times. The outer lanes are dedicated to slower car traffic, thereby easing traffic flow for cars that aim to exit the ring. Moreover, a set of new transferia integrate the boulevard in the larger traffic network of Moscow. These transit nodes, built on places where new metro lines and existing car and rail roads intersect, allow people to change between different types of transport. Finally, new developments enlarge the existing urban enclaves along the ring and create new ones. To increase their accessibility, new road connections in-between enclaves are created. These redirect destination traffic from the boulevard and improve circulation for drivers on the ring. → [see fig. 12]
Although designed as a circular highway, the MKAD has become a continuous strip that connects a multitude of destinations scattered around the city. Unintentionally, it has created a unique opportunity for hyperaccessibility. This opportunity, although currently frustrated by traffic congestion, should be embraced and amplified. The MKAD is not the highway it once was and returning it to this condition seems implausible. Just as the former defense walls were converted into boulevards and absorbed by the city, so the MKAD is transforming from a ring road into an urbanized area with its own car-based culture. As Moscow expands, the MKAD urban boulevard is not a border road anymore, but forms an integral part of the concentric city. → [see fig. 13, 14]
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fig. 3: Concentric borders of Moscow throughout history fig. 2
MKAD 1941
MKAD 1997
MKAD 1962
fig. 4: MKAD 2014
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fig. 5: Development of services along the MKAD
fig. 6: MKAD developments inside and outside the administrative border of Moscow
fig. 7: Exits on ring roads around the world
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fig. 10: MKAD City — images with help of Sergei Chervakov and Saveliy Lobanov
fig. 11: New retail and office developments in Moscow (left) and at the MKAD (right)
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fig. 12: Different modes of transit increase the capacity of the MKAD New transferia improve the connectivity of the MKAD New road connections increase the accessibility of the enclaves
MKAD 1997 — a road in the countryside
MKAD 2014 — a shopping street for cars
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Exit MKAD by Giulio Margheri /
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→ [fig.1: US highway design manual]
The most unique and remarkable feature of the MKAD is its exits. The exits are special both in number and design. Comparing the amount of exits of the MKAD with similar ring roads around the world, the Moscow ring on average has 3 times more exits per kilometer. Considering only the exits that give direct access to services connected to the ring, the MKAD has 14 times more exits. The Moscow ring road and its exits form the spine of a car-based system that connects all kinds of services, from cheap markets to middle-class shopping malls and high-end shops. Every service or cluster of services is located on a kind of asphalt island, an enclave that is directly connected to the ring and accessible only by car. The relationship between the designed speed on the main road and the designed speed on intersecting roads is very particular on the MKAD. In regular highway design practice, road exits and entrances should enable vehicles to leave and enter the main road at no less than 50% of the highway’s designed speed (70% is usual, 85% is desirable). On the MKAD, however, exits lead often to services or smaller streets by crossroads or T connections that force car drivers to drastically reduce their speed, while at the same time a proper lane for speed reduction is non-existent. This inconvenience in design creates problems also for drivers who are forced to quickly accelerate when entering the MKAD’s main road. It happens because in many places the exits and entrances overlap, rather than being separated, as with typical highway design.
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→ [fig. 2, 3: Short MKAD exits force drivers to drastically reduce their speed]
The exits become even more interesting when looking at the destinations they lead to. At MKAD km 45, an exit leads directly onto a dirt road that runs through dense vegetation to a set of rural houses. Similar situations of dirt road that enter on the MKAD can be found at other places along the ring, for example at MKAD km 97 where the MKAD intersects a small road that disappears into a tunnel made out of vegetation.
→ [fig. 4: MKAD exit km 45]
→ [fig. 5: MKAD exit km 97]
At MKAD km 42, the main road gives direct access to an open-air market. Here, in just a few meters from the regularly-occurring traffic jams, it is possible to buy fruits, vegetables, and to see dogs hanging around.
→ [fig. 6: MKAD exit km 42]
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At MKAD km 35, an exit, which is actually just a broadening of the road, creates a small parking area where drivers can stop immediately next to the main road to have some fast food or drinks.
→ [fig. 7: MKAD exit km 35]
At MKAD km 5, a blue gate located on the main road provides access to a series of Soviet garages.
→ [fig. 8: MKAD exit km 5]
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At MKAD km 14, the exit leads directly to a very busy and cheap market. On the main street near the intersection, taxi drivers wait in a line for clients to load their shopping bags into the taxis.
→ [fig. 9: MKAD exit km 14]
The exits of the MKAD already stand out for their number and design. Their eccentricity becomes even more apparent when zooming in at the destinations they lead to. The exits represent anything but good highway design. The enormous boom of the past 20 years around the MKAD is reflected on the road by the number of exits. At the same time the exits of the MKAD are a peculiarity and a potentiality of the road which should be developed rather than changed.
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the Medium
The intention of this study is to understand the process of communication between car, driver and the environment (city). The attempt is to investigate all possible aspects of how the car is related to different types of media. How has this relationship developed? Is the car itself a medium? Or just the message? Media: (single: medium) — an agency or means of communication process. If we think about the car it would be all agencies of communication between driver, car and environment.
Driver: a person who is using the car in the city for different purposes. Environment: all aspects, objects and interconnections of the city that are related to the driving process.
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Inside / Outside While driving, one is surrounded by the huge quantity of media: outside and inside the car. “Outside the car” media “containers” display an abundance of information, which presents itself during driving time. We have got so used to the media that we do not appreciate it anymore. Analysing it individually, one realizes what a massive flow of information targets the driver.
In a single moment, the driver has to deal with information about: ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
driving code distances and directions advertisements car services entertainment services parking information about other cars: plates, aerogaphy security system warnings etc.
Information is also provided to the driver by “inside the car“ media. Since the 1960s, “inside the car“ media has dramatically developed and is reflected in many types of digital gadget: ● ● ● ● ● ●
car audio systems radio navigation systems security systems dash cam mobile phone etc.
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Interestingly, the development of inside and outside the car media was totally different.
“Outside the car“ media developed in content and size but not in mediums. For example, different types of billboard still exist. They do not change their function, only their content. So do magazines and newspapers. Granted, magazines now have digital versions, but they don’t have additional features. One can’t use a billboard to change people’s daily routines. It is still just an image. Trying to understand how this picture developed throughout time, one can analyse its most prominent expression: the strategy of car placement in advertisements. This image permanently changed due to the state of society. Via their advertisements, car producers provided different messages to the population. It is their reflection on how society wants to use the car: as a sign of prosperity, or a symbol of your intention to be eco-friendly.
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In the prerevolutionary period, the car was considered a luxury item. At that time, all cars were imported. The Soviet period was characterized by incredible industrial growth, so the car became a symbol, representing the idea of a “brilliant future”. It was also a sign of a freedom in a very restricted country. In the 1980-90s, in general the technical development of car slowed down and turned into modernization of a particular aspect of the car: new eco-engines, speed, price forming. Today the mass trend is to sell to all possible options by using different price policies. On the contrary, “inside the car” media accumulated ever-new functions over time. For instance, the navigation system is still a digital version of a paper map, but it has the function of creating and monitoring routes. You can change your journey according to the analysis of the road situation. “Inside the car” media is also very widely used in terms of personalisation of the car, e.g. a driver can decide for himself what features he wants inside the car. Since the invention of the car radio, the number of digital devices has increased dramatically, culminating in today’s key invention, the navigation system. If one tries to understand the difference in communication with the city before the navigation system, it appears that the navigation system has allowed the car to produce new information for the city. This statement could be the basis for the following one: while trying to research all the media connected to the car retrospectively, one discovers that from the time of the introduction of the navigation system, the car has made the transition “media object” to “media subject”. Given the fact that through the navigation system the car itself started to produce and add information to the city, now it can draw many different pictures of it. The Car as a Media Subject Today we use cars to invent and give functions that allow us to communicate with the environment. The car itself become a medium between environment and driver, because it forms the relationship between the driver and the city. The car is no longer perceived from outside, but gets internalized as a live performer. In other words we delegate some of our actions and functions to the car and, of course, methods of gathering and perceiving the information have changed due to that. The car gives us a new context in isolation. Previously we were supposed to step out from the car and ask people on streets “How to find the library?”, for example. There was a chain of info kiosks, “Mosgorspravka“, where we could find all information we needed by asking a dispatcher. Now we drive through the city like “cosmonauts”, just typing addresses into our navigation systems and going from A to B. So we substitute using our real voices for using a gadget. Another new context lies in the field of communication between cars, represented by “Yandex traffic application”. We inform each other about traffic jams or accidents.
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Frankenstein Step by step, “inside the car” media and services were included in the car. For example, the mobile phone was first used as a hand-held device; thanks to Bluetooth technology, it was later integrated directly into the dashboard. You can even leave the phone in your pocket and use it. It represents how we have incorporated our voice into the body of the car. The dashboard has become a continuation of our vocal apparatus. The more this process of implantation increases, the more we delegate tasks to our cars. If “inside the car” media (gadgets) are supposed to be extensions of the human body, we can hypothesize that the car itself is the media extension of the human body. John Urry explains this phenomenon in his book “Inhabiting the Car” with the claim that “Automobility is a Frankenstein-created monster, extending the individual into realms of freedom and flexibility…” Of what parts does our Frankenstein consist? What exactly are we using to extend our abilities?
One can divide all extensions into ➂ types according to their function. Physical extensions. This category includes the car itself as a technical solution to enable us to cover longer distances. This is an extension of our legs. Humans can travel 5 kilometres per hour; a contemporary sports car can travel 388. Different types of gear box allow us to use our hands less in our driving process. Onboard computers have enlarged the “size” of our memory. Now drivers do not need to calculate the amount of kilometres passed before they have to change the motor oil; computer systems do it for them.
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Another category is about extensions of our senses. Radio extends our hearing. Navigation enablesour eyes to see beyond the horizon. Dash cams can keep our eyes open all day long. And the most diverse category is performance extensions. We use tinting on windows in the same way we wear sunglasses. Aerography is our new tattoo. The colour of the car reflects our taste in clothes. We can show off our power through the muscle car. And size also matters. You can buy a big Jeep or a little Smartcar. We use different pieces of decoration to add a sense of style to our “clothes”. We can reveal our identity through the car plate. We can even modify the logo and say “I am a Batman” to everybody.
How can this typology be used? So far we have different parts of our body and can draw the anthropometric portrait of a car. The Moscow car, for example. Statistical research will give us a picture of a Muscovite male who wears black clothes with small decoration elements; big eyes; loud voice and… short legs. It can be interpreted in the way that, due to the state of the transport system, the car in Moscow is becoming increasingly a means of performance, a symbol, but not a means of transportation. On average, no one part is leading. It is invisible how much we are delegating to different extensions. But in terms of finding different types of cyborgs, it is interesting to look to the maximum deviations from the average. The following interviewees represent the most “unusual” extensions.
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Physical extensions: BMW 5 series Touring. “The only one tuned BMW 5 series (E61)Touring in Moscow…” At the first sight this is normal car. However, it contains a hidden treasure. Engine, brakes and suspension are handmade by the owner. “My car should have a kit look: from outside it should be stylish but serious. No useless bright stickers and other decoration. All additions are hidden inside.” Looking at this car from the point of view of function delegation, we see that this driver wants to be the one who is leading in the driving process. He will never hand over responsibility for decision making to his car. Even the parking help system was broken a year ago and he totally forgot about it. It is interesting, by the way, that after all these extensions have been added, the driver’s perception of freedom has immediately increased.
Anton Lisovets. Owner, car stylist
Extensions of senses: Ford Explorer. Project “Sens-o-car”. This car is “…the instrument for studying the human as a driver... Without distracting the driver’s attention from the road, the car can analyse his/her activity and suggest some services…” It can even make a post on Facebook on your behalf and was designed to be a life hack for the driver: to analyse, for example, your routine trip from home to work and suggest the best decision for today — what road you should choose, where it would be faster to buy a coffee, and what time you need to finish your work in order to be at the gym in time. It can send you a SMS with all this information. In contrast to the previous car, this one is supposed to take part in human reflection. Not only the functions, but even the decision making. We can infer that this cyborg is very self-sufficient and that the driver is under the control of the devices — however, he imagines his life has become more free and flexible.
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Alexey Khokhulin. Project developer
Performance extensions: Daewoo Nexia with aerography. “This car is a reflection of my passions: drawing and horses... ”. In this case, the car was used as a canvas; it visually reflects the driver’s personality. The owner also mentioned that her perception of freedom after adding this extension increased.
Ekaterina Gerasimova. Owner, artist
The interviews show that despite the fact that the adopted “media” were completely different, the drivers’ perception of freedom increased after adding the extensions. However, the delegation of human functions to the car in these three groups is totally different.
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The Car is the Medium
Main Article
Conclusion Considering the idea of the car as an extension of the human body, the relationship between the participants in the communication process — car, driver, environment — has changed. The car and the driver have merged into one: the anthropocar. Communication is now happening between the anthropocar and the city. While the driver is inside the car, they are acting as one subject. One needs to rethink the common usage of word “media” in terms of cars and the theory of extensions of the human body. It seems that the car media in this discourse could be any part or unit of the car which was added or modified in order to send some message to the outside world. It could be either a powerful engine, which produces a loud noise and occupies the city’s sound space, or it could be a life hack system, which communicates with the city on your behalf . This little switch in understanding car media can actually explain a whole new world of communication. People are using their cars to create and follow their own ways of interacting with the city. And it is different in every case. Keeping this in mind we can say that every car media is creating a new “species”. Global trends are leading us to the driverless car, and this technology could result in new, and even larger, Frankensteins.
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How To Wear
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The Kit Look
Anton is a specialist in car styling, owner of the “True Parts” online shop.
Interview with Anton by
Lisovets Irina Eremenko
Name of The Car: Saray Model: Bmw 5 series Touring (E61)
Date of Birth: 2005 Engine: 3.0 TD/280 HP
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How To Wear The Kit Look
Pocket Article
How did you come up with the idea of making cars your hobby? This story started in my childhood, when I was 12 years old. Firstly I was interested in auto sport - drag races, then circuit races. I broke my first car after two weeks of driving. I started to read a lot and study the subject. I came to realise that all sources were saying pretty much the same thing, but I wanted to find something exclusive, which muscovite and Russian car drivers in general do not deal with. I started to study foreign forums. Of course, in the very beginning I used Russian cars, VAZ. At some point my driver’s license expired and that became the turning point, when I got really interested in car tuning. I started to modify the engine, brakes and suspension. I installed a compressor engine, handmade brakes, a sports steering wheel. I got rid of all the seats, besides the driver’s one. Actually only a few details would reveal that this was a VAZ-2108. Then I switched to foreign cars — “inomarki”. The level of the task’s complexity increased immediately. Every time, you need to find very rare parts from all over the world. Now I only look for really exclusive car parts; I do not use mass market products.
What car do you have now? I have the only tuned BMW E61 Touring in Moscow, with remote-control air suspension constructed from car parts from different models. This technical solution allows me to make a car with minimum clearance. This is the most interesting aspect for me now. In the highest position, the suspension makes the car even lower than the standard one; in the lowest, your car is just lying on the ground.
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Also, when you have a modified suspension system you cannot use ordinary wheels. It leads us to the new style — “stance”. It means that the tyres are wider than the disks. Then you have a fast car, and it means that you need to carry out a chip tuning to increase horse power. I have increased this amount from 210 to 300 hp. Then you have a powerful engine and suspension. And what about brakes? I think that brakes are the first thing you need to think about. If you want to have a good ride, you need to have good brakes!
What is more important about the car: to look stylish or to be technically modified? Both. It’s complex. It should have a “kit look” outside, to look serious and stylish. No useless stickers and bright pictures. From inside it should be exclusive and hand made. At the end you have very good-looking and dynamic automobile. But still the priority for me is to modify the technical aspects. Are there any restrictions which appeared after adding all these technical solutions? Actually I am always asked how I can drive when my car is just 2cm from the asphalt. It does not stop me. I believe that the car was made for driving and there is no sense modifying it and then just storing it somewhere. As far as I know your hobby transferred into work at some point. Is that true? Yes. I have an internet shop called True Parts. Again: no mass market products, only good quality, rare car replacement parts. I don’t have any decorations, only unique body kits. What do cars mean for you in general? Is it freedom, self-realisation, sport, or something else? My car is a self-expression, because I do not like to be similar to the majority and I am saying it through cars. I don’t understand how others can use totally the same cars as thousands of people do. It is a failure for me. I want to create something that others can’t. I am expressing myself in car styling.
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Drivers often become very close to their cars. When do you know that it’s time to buy a new one? To be honest, I’m in love not with the car but with the tuning that I have done. That’s why when everything is finished it becomes less interesting for me. Another way to decide is to understand that even if I have the idea of further improving, I just can’t do it physically, because of the technical restrictions. Does your current car have a name? Saray. Because it is a Touring version and it is a very rare car to be tuned. Actually from the very beginning nobody understood why I had turned from hatchbacks to touring models. Particularly because of this: it is interesting to do things that are not so obvious to do. To tune the Touring. Have your ever heard that your car looks similar to you? Like dogs sometimes looks similar to their owners? Not often. Sometimes a very unstylish guy owns a really cool car and vice versa. Actually I am well-known in the internet community and of course my car is too. So, people just know me and then they are associating my personality with a particular car. If you think of a car as an instrument of freedom, did all this technical additions influence your feeling of freedom? In what way? I can say that all these additions increased that feeling, but on different levels. First of all, other drivers sometimes give way to me just because they are looking at my car. The other level is that this car is helping me in self-realization; I have become pretty well-known in certain communities. Cars are developing very fast in general. A lot of different gadgets, which are supposed to carry out tasks for us, are appearing all the time — automatic parking systems or emergency brake systems, for example. How many human functions are you ready to delegate to your car? Actually I used to have cars with no supporting systems. I prefer a mechanical gearbox instead of automatic. It is funny, but my parking help system broke 18 months ago and I totally forgot about it. I don’t need it. I want to actually DRIVE the car, to be the one who is controlling the whole situation.
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Section B
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Driving. Stops. City.
5
Shanghai Moscow
Pocket Article: Ithaka
Pocket Article: Shanghai Routines
Considering the urban routine of sitting in a traffic jam in Moscow, the routine of driving is actually a routine of stopping. This urban routine is a perfect example where the drive, as Paul Virilio explains, “… turns into a sheer indisposition of waiting till the arrival”. Yet one needs to be aware that it is the stops, the high density of destinations, that creates importance for a place. When arrived at its final destination, a car immediately becomes a burden: where to park it? In Moscow, cars seem to be parked everywhere except in garages. These history-loaded private garages seem to have been too valuable for parking ever since their beginning, as ‘Shanghai’, Moscow’s most famous garage dwelling, shows. Recognized as a valuable urban typology, garages have the potential to become an official tool for development in Moscow.
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Stops. City.
by Alexander Ayoupov in memoriam Nata
This research is dedicated to stops. Stops are a particular moment in driving routines that connect the city and a person. The city itself is a product of and a tool for human activity. While participating in city life, a person follows their own instincts, needs and wishes. These recurring activities become patterns and thus become urban routines. Moscow is the biggest city in Russia, and one of the world’s most congested metropolises, having somewhere between 300 and 380 cars per 1,000 citizens. Over 12 million inhabitants drive almost five million cars — spending a total of more than 600 million hours per year sitting in traffic jams. This modest estimation leads to the understanding of Moscow as a car city. Car-related activities, such as driving, sitting in traffic jams and letting pedestrians cross the road, are the main components of urban traffic routines. From the driving perspective, the city is a place where you have to stop. 88 88
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Driving Activity … they remind you of the beauty of pretty simple things. You forget, because you’re so busy going from A to Z, that there’s 24 letters in between… -- Infected Mushroom, Drop Out In fact we can see driving as a process of stopping. Driving activity can be perceived from two standpoints: as ‘getting from point A to point B’ and as ‘getting from point A to somewhere’. Driving activity is rarely performed for the sake of the activity itself, just for practice. In this regard, the focus of the current research must be refined and detailed. Driving activity forms the driving routine. A person drives from home to work, from work to shop, from shop to home. Driving routine has its own time scale: to buy groceries for the whole week, to visit family, to see a country house. Driving requires a vehicle and a space to drive in. In terms of space, the driver travels from one point to another, but barely notices the stops he makes while driving. To interact with the city, to participate in other city activities, a driver has to stop. The whole experience of driving consists of the stops. This research is aimed to prove that a stop is ➀ an opportunity for a driver to grasp and claim the space; ➁ an indicator of urban activity; and ➂ a tool for identifying a driving city. From Space to Place Found himself out into the road -the dust up to his nose -put that anchor down to find a place where he could go, ‘cause he was looking for the shelter from the storm. -- Patrick Watson, The Storm Place is a private space. A car is privacy itself, a mobile place. When a driver stops and gets out of the car, he spreads his privacy to the surroundings. The stop therefore is a possibility for a person to create a place out of space. Fig. 1 represents the model of space to place transition. Although this model was inspired by ideas of Henri Lefebvre and Marc Augé, it has strong connection to the spatial framework of Robert Sack: “Place implies space, and each home is a place in space. Space is a property of the natural world, but it can be experienced. From the perspective of experience, place differs from space in terms of familiarity and time. A place requires human agency, is something that may take time to know, and a home especially so. As we move along the earth we pass from one place to another. But if we move quickly the places blur; we lose track of their qualities, and they may coalesce into the sense that we are moving through space.” → [see fig. 1]
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When a person plans his trip to a familiar destination, he has a mental map of the route. Usually there is no place for stops in this route; driving is automated and, therefore, a driver does not perceive stops. But eventually stops happen, expected or not. Then a driver has an opportunity to relate to the space, produce a place out of it and update his mental map with a new spot. The stop is a crucial point when a driver can change their focus from the transition to the location. Creation of a place out of a space is a change from continuous feeling to concrete. A driver may have to stop off several times to establish the link between the space and mental map. To claim the space, a person has to change it physically. On one of our field trips, we discovered a special place on the 3rd transport ring. It is a space intended for technical stops, but people just stop by there. Later, we found three references to that place from different people, defending this spot as a nice observation point. This spot is a border place: on the one hand, it offers the perfect opportunity to admire the controversy and staleness of Moscow-City business district architecture; on the other hand, an observer is locked in by the intense traffic behind him. It is worth paying attention to the source of this picture: it was taken by a Google car, by chance, and put on Google Street View. → [see fig. 2]
Terminal stops, which end with the death of a person, are another way to claim space. After an accident happens, relatives and friends of the deceased mark the place with cenotaphs1, flowers and personal items. Thus a place of tragedy is translated into one of memorial, from mental map to the space. According to research by Anna Sokolova from Institute of Ethnography and Anthropology, 80-90% of memorial places are marked. These marks have no chance to survive in Moscow as they are removed by communal services very quickly. Some places are even receiving architectural expression. The example on Fig. 3 shows 25km of the Moscow-Crimea road with a cenotaph and chapel to Shandor, the late gypsy singer. → [see fig.3]
It is in human nature to conquer and modify a space. Even throwing an empty can from a car window changes the environment. Once the place has the markers of a dump, people add more and more garbage to it. Similar to the processes of relieving oneself, dumping is contradictory in its social nature — it has to be done in secret, but if everyone does it in one place, then you can litter freely. → [see fig. 4]
Stops create places. People who share their places with others create common places and then — possibly — social ones, by defining the rules and rituals. For instance, car races on Vorobyevy Gory started as a meeting point for a few enthusiasts. Now this place, which exists only at night, is supported by hundreds of drivers. The most interesting thing is that it is temporary — after the initial gathering, different groups disperse themselves around the city.
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Cenotaph — literally ‘empty tomb’ from Greek, a tomb or monument without actual remains of deceased, usually constructed on a place of death.
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Framing The City By Stops Get in the car, get in the car! We keep it running but you won’t get far! We got velocity! The next stop is Atro City! -- Lostprophets, Next Stop Atro City The city may be one big place, but on a larger scale it is merely a stop in a journey across the country. Approaching the question from a functional perspective, we can define the city as a place of high density and frequency of events. Here are two pictures framing the city using different tools: first is a NOAA-NASA aerial photo of Moscow lit by night; the second is a Twitter map created using geodata of computer users. The first shows more the ‘official’ city — density of the most basic urban commodity — while the second offers a map of internet-connected citizen events. → [see fig. 5]
If a car stops, something happens; an event occurs. An event is a combination of three things: where, when and what. Assuming that the stop offers a possibility of interaction with environment, the analysis of big data of stops could be used for identification of places. In 2013, there was a major release of GPS-tracks from OpenStreetMap (OSM) which allowed the extraction of 466,000 stops from 160 million track points and processing them with GIS software. City of Density Without going too far into qualitative analysis of reasons for stops, the aggregated big data represented by the heat map of stops shows that possible interaction and the driving city sprawl includes not only the Moscow MKAD Ring Road, but several kilometers of radial roads attached to it. Small, but identifiable, red dots represent villages and satellite towns. → [see fig. 6]
Grouped by time of day, these maps represent different temporal framings of the city. Morning driving city rushes to the center; daytime city is framed inside the Garden Ring and South-West; evening city propels drivers back to the outskirts; and night city is almost dead, having only a few anomaly spots. Although this data should be taken with minor reservations2, improvements are necessary. → [see fig. 7]
It is possible to have an automated map of city issues with the use of objective data taken from official sources. For instance, traffic police registering the accidents could enhance their statistics capabilities by understanding the problematic spaces where accidents happen more often, and by taking care of it. The density of stops shows the density of places and depicts the city of stops. The higher the density, the more urbanity we have. 2
Taking into the account that this data is from relatively small number of OSM enthusiasts, it has some suspicious tracks that needed to be filtered out.
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City of Frequency If we take a look at definitions of urban areas, we find that this concept varies across different countries. Main approaches include definition by the number or density of population, official recognition of an area as urban, functional or the rather vague term ‘center’ (these are the analyzed definitions used by the UN and UNICEF). These approaches give little understanding of the interaction that happens in cities. The proposal is to go from density to frequency: the more frequent stops are, the more urban the area is. Thus a new measurement tool emerges — stops per minute (spm) or — for a larger scale — stops per hour (sph). According to a report by Ilya Zalivukhin (Jauzaproject, 08 April 2014), one of the problems of Moscow traffic is the lack of distinction between city streets and highways. Another issue is the mix of transit and public transport systems. The idea that a driver does not need to stop on the highway can serve as a key point of distinction between roads. The stops-per-minute measurement unit could be used as a tool for the identification of actual urban or highway use of the roads. Most of the stops are elusive, not only from a driver’s perspective, but from GPS trackers too. Given the amount of time it took to conduct the research, first attempts to register stops and calculate their frequency were simple: sitting in the passenger seat and putting a dot in a notebook for every complete stop we made while simultaneously marking the approximate time when the stop took place. The tricky part was the choice of time slicing of the observation. Any stop could take from one second to 30 minutes. A minute was taken as the minimum amount of time. This method helps reveal hidden stops, but is nonetheless time-consuming and not error-free. The members of Strelka Car Studio made several field trips, which formed the basis for method application. I joined my colleague in her routine trip from prospekt Vernadskogo to Strelka and back. As Moscow is famous for its traffic jams, we took the opportunity to experience morning and evening high congestion. The 43-minute jouney from Vernadskogo to Strelka had 49 stops (spm = 1.14). The return journey took 64 minutes with 76 stops (spm = 1.19). Although one can expect a correlation between average speed and spm value, there is no visible one. This can be explained by the fact that each stop takes a varying amount of time. Another example is from a day-long field trip around Moscow. Spm values were different on different sections of the road: up to 2 spm in traffic jams to the minimum of 0.24 spm in the late evening when the only stops were caused by traffic lights and pedestrians crossing the road. Car Studio made a trip from Moscow to Kazan and back, which gave an opportunity to calculate sph value for urban areas and highways. This time the data for the research was taken from a dash cam installed in one of the cars. The sph value for urban areas varied from 12 in Nizhniy Novgorod to an unexpected 31 in Vladimir, when we got stuck in a traffic jam due to the road works. Highway values varied from 0.24 (Nizhniy Novgorod – Vladimir) to 1.8 (Nizhniy Novgorod – Kazan). → [see fig. 8]
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As a result, the comparison of the maximum sph value for the highway (1.8) and the minimum value for the city (12) reveals almost a seven times difference, which identifies the city on a larger scale. Therefore, stops per minute and stops per hour values can be used as a tool for identification of the driving city from bottom-up data on different scales. Conclusion Driving routine is a trip through a set of stops. Encountering a stop creates an opportunity to claim the space, to turn the space into a place. The practical outcome could be in finding small clues that make space more suitable for stops to allow citizens and tourists have more diverse places they can call their own. As a continuation of the idea of personal ownership of a space, any person has the possibility to share the place by marking it and sharing the information, thus creating common — and, eventually, social — places. To discover such personal and common places, the big data could also be used. Different scales and filters of stop data can help to identify promising places: from a spot in the forest as a spontaneous discovery to the city as a metaplace. Density of stops provides information on the quality of places, if the researcher bears in mind that there is a reason for every stop. The other indicator gathered from individual trip statistics — the frequency of driving stops (stops per minute) — could be used to define urban activity areas. The more one stops in the area, the more urban-active the area is. As for possible further investigations, an integral indicator of ‘urbanity’ — stops per minute per meter — could be introduced as a combination of three components: space, time and an implicit reason. Stops per minute and derivative units could be an attempt to use the bottom-up data to make top-down decisions.
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fig. 1: Model of space to place transition
fig. 2: Sightseeing place, Moscow 3rd Transport Ring
fig. 3: Cenotaph and chapel of late gypsy singer Shandor, 25km of Moscow-Crimea road
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fig. 4: Garbage dump, ‘Shanghai’ garage village in Moscow
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fig. 5: Moscow night lights and Moscow Twitter activity map
fig. 6: Heat map of stops based on OSM data
fig. 7: Snapshots of stops grouped by time of day
95 fig. 8: Combined density and frequency map of stops, Moscow – Kazan – Moscow
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Ithaka by
C.P. Cavafy
As you set out for Ithaka hope the voyage is a long one, full of adventure, full of discovery. Laistrygonians and Cyclops, angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them: you’ll never find things like that on your way as long as you keep your thoughts raised high, as long as a rare excitement stirs your spirit and your body. Laistrygonians and Cyclops, wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them unless you bring them along inside your soul, unless your soul sets them up in front of you. Hope the voyage is a long one. May there be many a summer morning when, with what pleasure, what joy, you come into harbors seen for the first time; may you stop at Phoenician trading stations to buy fine things, mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony, sensual perfume of every kind— as many sensual perfumes as you can; and may you visit many Egyptian cities to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars. 96 96
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Keep Ithaka always in your mind. Arriving there is what you are destined for. But do not hurry the journey at all. Better if it lasts for years, so you are old by the time you reach the island, wealthy with all you have gained on the way, not expecting Ithaka to make you rich. Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey. Without her you would not have set out. She has nothing left to give you now. And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you. Wise as you will have become, so full of experience, you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean. Translated by Edmund Keeley/Philip Sherrard (C.P. Cavafy, Collected Poems. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Edited by George Savidis. Revised Edition. Princeton University Press, 1992) 97 97
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Moscow
Cars: we imagine them always in motion, but 80% of the time, they are parked. Ever since the first cars arrived in the city, there has been a problem of storing them. Open air parking was not an option at that time, as early cars were scarce and rusted easily. Thus a totally new building type emerged: the garage. by Elena Mazina
fig. 10
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Garages Different perceptions of car ownership require different types of garages. At first, cars were an exclusive item that only a few could afford. At that time, converted carriage houses were common for car storage. When public transport and trucks were introduced in the 1920s, they were stored in big ground-level garage complexes. In the 1930s, company cars appeared, and they were stored in multi-story parking garages.1 After World War II the mass motorization of the country began. This was when the problem of storing personal cars first became a huge problem. As the personal car was still considered a luxury item, the Soviet government didn’t provide car owners with garages. Therefore, to solve the mass shortage of garages, authorities adopted a very cheap and effective solution: not to interfere with the cooperative movement. This attitude determined the trend of storing personal cars in the city for next 40 years. → [see fig. 1]
Garage Cooperatives In 1960 the Decree № 1475 “On organization of cooperatives for the construction and operation of collective garage — parking for private cars” was published. This allowed people to pool their money, acquire land from the government and build cooperative garages.2 Relevant departments prepared several types of parking garage designs and prefabricated garages to choose from.3 The cheapest and easiest to build were ground-level garage boxes. They were set in line, thereby forming streets. Since this has proven to be the most affordable type they became commonplace.4,5 → [see fig. 2]
Land for garage cooperatives was usually allocated in areas not suitable for capital construction: on the slopes of ravines, under power lines, along railways or over communication facilities.6 Like pioneers, car owners moved into the urban “frontier zone” and mastered these territories.7 Nowadays, as the city has grown, the frontier line has moved. And many of these cultivated territories have become economically valuable. They are recognized as suitable for capital construction, and garages are being demolished. → [see fig. 3, 4]
Space for Freedom When not moving, the car is a large thing to store. Logically, the first storage for cars was a room where previously people stored other objects which were not suitable for home storage — namely, — a shed.8 The sheds’ history goes back to the distant past, when living space was too precious and scarce to be used as storage. And homes were always accompanied by outbuildings 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Interview with D. Romodin Apr.14, 2014 in Moscow Decree № 1475 “On organization of cooperatives for the construction and operation of collective garage — parking for private cars” Za rulem, no.6 (1966) Za rulem, no.22 (1929) Za rulem, no.8 (1993) Vestnik MGSA, no.12 (2013) http://www.roomgsa.info/gazeta/materials/MGSA1213.pdf Za rulem, no.3 (1967) Za rulem, no.13 (1935)
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for domestic needs. Until the Khrushchev era, Moscow courtyards were full of rows of sheds. Mostly they were used for storing firewood, but they were also used as bedrooms, henhouses, warehouses, craft workshops, etc. Only with the advent of mass construction, with its strict shapes and tough land distribution, did barns disappear from the yards.9 At the same time, garages started to be actively built, so some additional functions moved from sheds into garages. → [see fig. 5]
For Russians, a real garage was never just a parking place. It was a personal Man space. The place where he is free – where there was no wife, no superiors and no government. Moreover it was a service space where he could spend hours repairing his car by himself, as there was no alternative.10 Generations men and boys spent all their free time there. → [see fig. 6]
The desire for an additional space was so strong that even parking garages built in Soviet times were “privatized” and subdivided.1 These garages are a purely Soviet phenomenon, which evolved because of the absence of private property. Along with dachas, garages offered the only opportunity to acquire non-governmental property in Soviet times. The garage became a platform for people to practise management and civil self-organization.11 — a private space in a communistic environment. The shift to capitalism triggered the potential of hidden processes that were going on there before. Shift Nowadays the number of cars has increased dramatically. This affected all aspects of car routine. One of the most striking outcomes of mass motorization is that the car has become less precious. People now are not afraid of parking their car open-air in the yard, and yards have actually become parking lots. Garages which already had premises of additional function during Soviet times are now used in a great variety of ways. The most edgy example of this shift is Shanghai garage city. Case Study: Shanghai Moscow In Russian slang the word Shanghai means slum: big, tight cluster of constructions (garages, houses, huts). Often these buildings are the result of self-trapping of land. Shanghai is situated on expensive land south-west of the main building of MSU. The reason that it still exists is that below Shanghai lies Moscow’s largest underground bunker. It was designed to accommodate 15,000 people for 30 years in the event of nuclear attack, and is connected with other strategic objects via Metro-2.12 Besides the bunker there are other FSB-related structures (see diagram). Garages have been there since the construction of high-rise buildings in the 1970s. It is believed that the Shanghai was built specifically to make this territory an abandoned zone. → [see fig. 7]
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V. Fedorov, Ostankino sheds, Moscow 2013 http://www.proza.ru/2013/03/29/596 L.H. Siegelbaum, Cars for Comrades. The Life of the Soviet Automobile, Ithaca, NY 2008 A. Razmahnin, USSR garage cooperatives as a school of civil society Moscow 2011 http://svpressa.ru/society/article/35823/ Military forces in transition, Washington 1991
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Shanghai includes over 10,000 garages; hundreds of multi-story unauthorized constructions; dozens of illegal car services, shops, etc. There is a large probability that the area houses gambling dens, brothels and places of production of drugs. The main industry is everything related to the car. There is a great diversity of car services: carwashes, workshops, tyre fitting, etc. Genuine garage craftsmen skills are still present. However, it has turned into business.13 Some garages are reprogrammed into cafes and shops (household goods, automotive parts, food, alcohol, etc.) Often car service garages have buildups on top of them. This second floor is usually used for dwelling of migrant workers, yet living rooms can also be on the underground level. Some garages are turned into townhouses — all done without building permission. Not all garages in Shanghai are converted. Services, shops and cafes are primarily concentrated along the main streets from the main entrance to the garage cooperative. Buildup is the most visible sign that a garage has been converted. Sometimes these structures reach unbelievable scales. Another option is to demolish garages and rebuild from scratch according to the new needs.14 → [see fig. 8, 9, 10]
Unearthing a typology The way one can rebuild depends on the basic structure. Garages can be metal single, metal linear, concrete linear or brick linear structures. Each type has its particular advantages and disadvantages. Garage can be added to with a cellar, a block container, a concrete block structure or a metal structure. The freedom of adding adjacent units adds a lot to the diversity of the settlement. An interesting feature: everyone aims to attach No Man’s Land if only there is an opportunity to do so.15 → [see fig. 11, 12, 13, 14]
The qualities that make garages so attractive for alternative use are: simple structure; cheap cost; everyone has his own front door: direct access to street; independence from neighbors: opportunities to dig down or build up; flexible plans; possible independence from city supply; neglect of formal regulations. → [see fig. 15]
This “village-like” blocked garage typology spread throughout the city because of the car. Over time it showed that it can be useful for many other purposes — perhaps because the structure of the garages looks very similar to those of old marketplaces and warehouses.
13 Anastasia Barshchevskaya, Interview with one garage master, Minsk 2014 http://www.abw.by/news/157411/ 14 Interview with Konstantin P. Mar.27, 2014 in Shanghai Moscow 15 S.M. Shumilkin, Shopping complexes of European part of Russia late XVIII - early XX centuries: typology, architectural and spatial development, Moscow 1999
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Similar typologies in the past Carriage houses. The predecessors of cars in the city were horse-drawn carriages. They were stored in stable yards. Stable yards usually included stables, carriage houses, sheds for other staff and dwelling units for stablemen. Marketplaces. Trading rows were the main elements of marketplaces. In the XVI century a trading row was a series of one-story wooden stalls set in line. Warehouses. Transport is one of the most important factors for the warehouse. Storage areas were located in close proximity to docks and railway lines. Conclusions. As we can see from the table, there is a very strong similarity between these typologies. But non of these examples can provide what the garages offer: an intimate, private space. → [see fig. 16]
Similar typologies eventually turned into big multi-level boxes: markets into huge malls; warehouses into big containers with shelves operated by fork-lift trucks; garages into multi-level parking lots. Carriage houses entirely disappeared from the city. This whole scale and typology is going away from the city. Now these garages are obsolete for storing cars, as it is impossible to store all the cars in one ground level. → [see fig. 17, 18]
Sum up. Proposal The way life in the city is developing is all about increasing density. People used to have not only a living unit, but also an additional space for freedom. This culture has survived within the garage. In these places a new pattern of activity developed over time. In fact, the existing garages are less important than the pattern itself, and the cultural and architectural typology they inherit. This research identifies the main qualities that let this model exist. These qualities can be used in a better way – either by reviving existing garage cooperatives or building new structures according to these qualities. These garages cannot be left as they are now; there are certain elements that don’t work well. However, these places cannot be totally formalized, as one of their main values is the “neglect of formal regulations”. I propose that the creation of special zones of freedom in the city would encourage freedom of use. A special legal, administrative, tax and construction regulations could be arranged there. The freedom of these small-scale economic zones would be restricted to the typology. Here economic freedom is understood as the freedom to produce, trade and consume any goods and services acquired without the use of force, fraud or theft.
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Value of Small Entrepreneurship The incentive for government to arrange these special zones could be small-scale entrepreneurship. Informal processes can compensate for what formal structures miss. Small businesses provide sustainability to the economy. They are easy to manage, very flexible and easily adapt to economic changes.i16 Small businesses’ share in the Russian economy is much lower than in the world’s leading economies.17 Small businesses help generate employment opportunities. While big corporations hire people with many qualifications, small firms hire people even with unimpressive resumes. → [see fig. 19]
In the history of capitalist countries there are many examples where the garage has served as a launching pad for business. As it turns out, a garage is a great place to start a company. Some of the world’s most known businesses started in garages: Amazon, Apple, Disney, Google, Harley Davidson, Hewlett-Packard, Mattel, etc. Everything starts from nothing. None of these companies began by trying to create Amazon, Apple, and Google. They started by creating an online bookstore, a computer, and a search algorithm. → [see fig. 20]
Housing, Office, Theater, … A clear urban policy, allowing to preserve the best features of this environment and add a new qualities, is needed. Each zone needs to create its own solution. Whatever is needed for the territory can happen in a garage. It depends very much on the people around it. The precious feature is that these places always offer a mix of functions. → [see fig. 21]
We should recognize it officially as a building typology. We usually don’t see the value of these small things, but they can make a huge contribution to the city.
16 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, OECD http://www.oecd.org/russia/Russia-Modernising-the-Economy-EN.pdf 17 Global Entrepreneurship Monitoring
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fig. 1: Different types of garages in time
fig. 2: Ground-level garage boxes
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fig. 3: Map of individual box garages. Main trend: the less valuable territory — the more garages. Large garage patches are stretched along roads
fig. 4: Satellite image of garages, 2014. This very special type of construction makes almost no confusion to recognise
fig. 5: History of the additional space in the city
105 fig. 6: A real garage for the Russians is not just a parking place, it is a closed personal men space
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fig. 7: Bunker city in Ramenki
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fig. 12: Additional structure options
fig. 13: Freedom of blocking adjacent units gives the diversity of plans
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fig. 15: The qualities that make garage so attractive for alternative use
fig. 16: Comparison of similar typologies in the past
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fig. 17: This whole scale and typology is going away from the city
fig. 18: Now these garages are obsolete for storing cars
fig. 19: Value of small entrepreneurship
109 fig. 20: California Historical Landmark # 976
fig. 21: Potential of the typology
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Shanghai Routines Interview with Konstantin P., Shanghai guide, garage owner, Mar. 27, 2014
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Elena Mazina
We met Kostya when our motley company came to Shanghai for the very first time. When we went there, none of us knew what to expect, but we certainly did not anticipate that everyone we talked to would speak English. That field trip left a vivid impression in our memories. Following is a conversation between Kostya and I, which took place the next time I visited Shanghai. 110 110
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E: To begin with, how did you end up in Shanghai? K: I did mountain biking, and decided to take up motorcycling. I asked my friend to find me a motorbike. Once he found it, he told me to collect it from here. That’s it. And now I have two garages here. It’s convenient: there is a very big crowd. You’ve probably noticed there are no universal centers; it’s predominantly small garages. Well, just next to the entrance there are several big centers. Some well-known services have moved there lately. Still, in most cases everyone does what he is most skilled at. Someone solely painting, someone solely bodyshop, someone solely electronics, and that’s cool. In this regard, Shanghai is a very good place. E: Speaking about services, when did this alternative usage theme start? K: I think it always was here. I think it’s from the Soviet era, when people were repairing their cars by themselves. Almost all garage cooperatives in Moscow have it to a greater or lesser extent. Once services appear, you need a car parts shop. Then you need to buy cigarettes, drinks, alcohol. As soon as the migrants came they brought their national cuisines. There are many local cafes, very tasty by the way. E: And when did illegal immigrants come? K: When I arrived seven years ago there were some already, but not so many. I think they came at the same time when they appeared in Moscow. Just some of them carved a niche in car services instead of sweeping the streets or doing vendor’s work. E: Which nationalities inhabit Shanghai? Are there any patterns of settlement according to nationalities? K: Yes, there is some ethnic differentiation. On the first line just after the entrance there is the Caucasus. All of Asia (Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan) is located higher (further along). E: And what about the police, do they visit this place? K: Yes, constantly. Periodically they arrange raids to catch criminals and take illegal immigrants. (Sharif, the guy whom I was going to talk to, was caught by the Federal Migration Service only a couple days ago) E: Do any Muscovites live here permanently? K: Yes, but very few. Muscovites and migrants use garages differently. Migrants work here, live here, equip everything with the necessary facilities. Muscovites use it as garages, rehearsal space, warehouses. For example I keep all the sports gear for our team here. E: And what is the approximate ratio of garages to converted garages? K: My rough estimation is that more than half are used as garages. Generally all service places can be seen from the street. If you see car parts stacked on the roof, then there is a service. Many large services rent neighboring garages as warehouses. Often car service garages are built up. The second floor is usually used as dwellings for migrant workers. Living space can also be on the underground level.
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E: We’ve talked a lot about what’s going on here, but what about the practical side of things: electricity, water. How are these issues solved? K: There is the city electricity supply, but it is not enough. Services consume a lot of energy, so in addition there are diesel generators. There is no city water supply, and we can’t drill a well due to the underground bunker. Therefore people illegally cut into urban networks. Dry closets usually stand in the streets with active life. As I said, not all garages are converted; many are used for their original purpose. Life (services, shops, cafes) is primarily concentrated along the main streets from the main entrance to the garage cooperative. E: Shanghai creates an impression of a closed place, not for everyone… K: Yes, strangers are not really welcome here. If you’re standing out from the normal picture, most likely you will be asked what you doing here and asked to leave. And it’s not a good idea to visit this place at night. E: Does the closeness to FSB affect this place in any way? K: Once there was a case. We gave the car keys to a friend. He was supposed to take it from Shanghai. So he called, said: I’m coming, I’m almost here, and then he disappeared for three hours. It turned out that he got lost and accidentally wandered on to the FSB territory where he was immediately taken by four people with guns. Actually, everything under the sun can happen here. Recently APC visited a repair shop. It has already left, but I can send you pictures. I was amazed. I went into the garage, and saw there APC and workers welding something. It was strange. E: What do you think it means for the city have places like this? And how long will they remain? K: There is a circulation of used cars which otherwise would simply clog up all the streets of Moscow. Why do these people repair in garages, and not in official services? Because the official ones take crazy money. That’s why the traffic in these artisanal services is so big. There have been many rumours about demolition, but almost nothing has been demolished. Garages continue to be bought and sold.
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Pocket Article: The Rawness of Non-Routine
Pocket Article: From 1986 to 2014
Pocket Article: Field Diary
Pedestrians form the largest group of participants in Moscow’s traffic. The mass-automobilization of Moscow did not leave pedestrians unaffected. Pedestrian-only zones, like Arbat Street and Gorky Park, gradually turned into ‘environments’ that emit a public feel-good atmosphere, competing with atmospheres inside a car. More than 70% of the city’s surface is covered with Microrayons, large-scale residential districts with limited car access. Mass motorization forced its way into the courtyards and created an inverse reality, an involuntary-shared space for pedestrians. Rethinking these spaces and the approach to shared space has the potential to unleash a new pedestrian landscape for Moscow. The Microrayons together with the Metro formed the basis of Soviet urban planning of Moscow. As the master planning of the Microrayons fundamentally changed due to the car, so did the Metro also change through the impact of consumerism and office labor. Especially the above-ground areas around stations became urban magnets for shops, restaurants, amusement, and offices. The high concentration of people and activity near stations makes these nodes a key element for Moscow’s polycentric future planning. Between 1.00am and 5.30am, no Metro is working. During this time, Moscow becomes a different city, which perhaps could be called a village. The lack of public transport works in the favor of the taxis and in particular for the illegal taxis called Bombilas. Like nomads, they roam the streets of the city looking clients 117 to occupy their night and to fund their livelihoods.
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Nodal City Rereading Moscow Through its Metro by James Schrader
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The City Is Not As It Seems We think of most cities as continuous physical urbanization. We theorize the city as parallel to how a car moves: as a fabric of varying conditions extending across the ground plane in all directions, interrupted only by water, topography, and infrastructure. In Moscow, the city extends from its center at the Kremlin to its periphery at MKAD and beyond, organized in the minds of many by the punctuations of the meandering river and the concentric ring roads. This conception of the city stands in stark contrast to the daily experience of urban reality in Moscow. Because the majority of Muscovites travel by Metro — there are nine million rides on an average workday — it is the Metro experience of fragmentation and disorientation that determines the leading perception of the city. Being hidden underground, the Metro is not obviously legible in the physical form of the city, but it strongly affects how people use and perceive the city. Life by Metro is a routine of constant disappearance into black holes and reappearance at other, seemingly disconnected places throughout the city. These places, which could be called ‘nodes’, play host to intense activity in the areas surrounding Metro stations. The organization of life around these nodes is so significant that Moscow can be considered a ‘nodal city’ rather than the continuous city implied by its physical form. Metro As Critical To Life In Moscow Plans for an underground subway system, now known as the Metro, began in Moscow before the First World War but were delayed due to war. Construction finally began in 1933, around the same time that plans for a 10-line, 80-kilometer system were approved by the Soviet leadership. The first segment of the red line opened in 1935 with an 11-kilometer, 13-station route. The system was expanded in numerous phases over the course of the 20th century, despite major events like the Second World War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. As of March 2014, the Moscow Metro system has 12 lines with 194 stations and a route distance of 325.4 kilometers. The system serves nine million passengers on workdays. Metro began in the 1930s, in the historical context of rapid population growth due to industrialization, which was transforming the urban and social structure of Moscow. Metro was an ideological project: a tool for demonstrating Soviet expertise to the world and for instilling Soviet values in young workers who came from throughout the USSR. Metro was also a ‘palace for the people’, an important venue for displaying ideological art that people could engage with every day. The elites also had their own Metro: a super-deep ‘Metro 2’ system supposedly connects key official installations for usage in the event of a nuclear crisis. For the non-elites in times of crises, the deeper stations of Metro served as airraid shelters during the 1941 Siege of Moscow. Later, many Cold War-era stations were equipped with life-sustaining features for use if the surface ever became uninhabitable.
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But the shelter can also become a battlefield: a number of attacks on the Metro in the post-Soviet era indicate that it continues to be a site of ideological conflict. How The Metro Makes Moscow A Nodal City A number of historical precedents form the basis of theorizing Moscow as a nodal city. In 1896, the British Sir Ebenezer Howard proposed a ‘Garden City’, comprised of seven urban nodes that would be physically separated from each other by agriculture and nature. In 1957, the Situationists depicted Paris, a physically continuous city, as being experienced by its citizens as disconnected nodes. In 1977, Oswald Matthias Ungers theorized a strategy for downsizing West Berlin into physically isolated enclaves, each with very distinct identities. In a similar idea on the scale of an individual building, in ‘Delirious New York’, Rem Koolhaas describes the different floors of Manhattan skyscrapers as being distinct worlds, isolated from each other and connected only by the lifeline of the elevator; this idea parallels the way that the Metro connects together different nodes. In Moscow, the Metro system is not a continuous fabric throughout the city but is made up of clearly defined paths which lead to stations that are points of entry into the city. This can be seen in the ubiquitous diagrammatic map of the Metro, but looking at the Metro in a less commonly seen geographic plan view allows a more accurate understanding of the spatial relationship between Metro and the city. Time and space are collapsed along each individual line, connecting its stations into a linear city. But a more useful way of looking at the Metro is as an integrated network, where a rider can move from any of the 194 stations to any end point and the routing does not matter. This integrated network can be seen simply as a system of 194 access points in the city that create a field of varying density. The 194 stations create access to their nodes, the area immediately adjacent to them and accessible by foot or by other modes of ground transportation. Since its 1930s inception, the Metro’s history can be seen not just as an expansion of train lines but also as a continuous expansion of the territory accessible to public transport riders. This expansion will continue into the future, as the Metro executes numerous line extensions as well as a second ring line and the integration of an underused railway ring into the Metro network. When using the city by Metro, a rider cannot easily access the area outside of a station node. Travelling underground, a rider is also unable to perceive the city between stations. Metro is like a horizontal elevator or a teleportation device, moving people from one place to another as if the in-between spaces do not exist. Metro Nodes As Urban Typology: Case Study Universitet A node is the territory around a Metro station which contains the urban activity that exists in relation to that station. The node of Universitet station on the red line will be examined as a case study of how: ➀ infrastructure enables access to a node; ➁ walkability creates the heart of a node’s territory; ➂ a node’s territory is extended by surface transportation; and ➃ a full range of content and activity is attracted to the node.
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The existence of the node is enabled by underground infrastructure of tunnels, tracks, trains, and stations. Each station is like a magnetic wormhole in the city, attracting people into an area and into the mobility infrastructure. Every node is a link to the entire Metro system, and has the potential to tap into the huge amount of people who use this system every day. Each station is also like a pressure valve that releases people from the system out into the streets. The deep underground hidden network of motion leads to a long ascent up escalators that emerge into the node at a ground-level plaza. People arriving at and leaving the node by Metro over the course of the day make up two different ecosystems of passenger. Many different kinds of urban routines are intertwined; a node may be home for one person, the office for another, shopping for another, or home, office and shopping together for someone else. The starting point for defining the heart of a node is a typical 500-meter walkable radius from each station exit. Car, taxi, bike, bus, trolleybus, tram, and marshrutka each extend the node’s territory in their own way. Bus shelters protect waiting passengers from the elements. Marshrutkas crowd the bus stop areas but are much more disorganized and informal. The tram occupies its own lane but only goes in a very limited range of directions. Parking seems to be everywhere, and also provides a place for taxis to pick up passengers. The few bike lanes connecting the node with other attractions haven’t quite caught on yet. The idea of nodes extending beyond walkable territory can be approximated on a city scale by using a Voronoi diagram, a mathematical model for dividing space into areas belonging to their nearest point, which in this case would be the nearest Metro station. The Voronoi model in this study was further refined by assigning MKAD and the river as hard edges that a node could not cross. When a line extends beyond MKAD, each node was assigned a maximum radius of 8km from its station. The Metro’s 194 stations are magnets for retail, offices, dwellings, and recreation facilities. Within the Universitet node, we can see that the 1957 microrayon housing area, which slightly pre-dates the Metro station, is an even carpet of buildings which does not orient itself toward Metro. In contrast, the 1971 circus and the newer buildings of Moscow State University seem well-positioned to take advantage of their proximity to the Metro. Post-2003 apartment buildings and shopping malls also seem to be clearly attracted to the access the Metro affords. Perhaps the central planning of the Soviet era could not address the usefulness of the Metro as effectively as the new capitalist era. An old outdoor market is bustling on the plaza next to the Metro station, with informal merchants hawking their pickled vegetables and flowers on its fringes. Shops in old housing blocks face the Metro, while similar blocks further away have no shops; the same typology has different usage in different locations. Across the street, the new housing blocks have the same general typology as the old blocks but are denser, taller, and closer to the Metro. A recently built small shopping center literally hugs the Metro station building. At the edge of the 500-meter walkable area, seemingly positioned to attract both Metro riders and car drivers, there is Kapitoliy, a large mall with international shops, entertainment, and an Ashan hypermarket.
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Based on these observations of the typical-seeming node at Universitet, we see that with the exception of offices and government, the Universitet node has all the basic elements of a self-sustaining city. The View From The Ground: An Urban Routine In The Nodal City Everything described so far is just a model of the city based on observations. The maps shown represent the theoretical ideal aggregation of urban routines of every Muscovite who travels by Metro. But a single individual’s urban routine for life in Moscow is much more unique, much more subjective, and much harder to precisely define. The real city is much more chaotic, unpredictable, lively, and complex than these models can predict. There may be a great deal of tension between Metro station nodes in the city center where they are fairly close together. If you as an individual are choosing how to get from your home to your destination, there may be two or more Metro stations within a tolerable walking distance. You might choose your route to your destination based on many more criteria than just which Metro station is nearest. These criteria might be the time of day or time of year, the weather, which Metro station offers the most direct connection to your destination, or what your priorities are for the day. For example, you might choose to walk to a farther-away Metro station if it’s a beautiful sunny day and that station offers a direct connect to your destination. On the way home at night you might choose to arrive at a station from which the walk home seems safer and more pleasant than from another station. Although the macro-scale city map from this analysis depicts nodes as pure circles, many factors affect or extend the borders of a node and may be constantly changing. In your daily urban routines, you probably only have three or four nodes that you are intensely familiar with, such as the node where your home is, the node where your work is, and perhaps a node where you go shopping or meet your friends frequently. These are the nodes where you know the streets and buildings very well and where you know exactly which exit to take from the Metro station to get to the right street corner. Every other node in Moscow remains somewhat of a mystery for you; there are some you go to occasionally but don’t know every nook and cranny of, and there are others that you’ve never been to. Any journey into these lesser-known or unknown nodes could be considered an exploration. Implications For Moscow’s Network Structure And Urban Routines Moscow can be reread as having a nodal organization rather than a geographically continuous organization. If the Metro could be seen as the most significant network structure in Moscow for determining how people use the city, then we can take advantage of this as an organizational tool for crafting the future of the city. In 1956, Italian Communist politician Palmiro Togliatti proposed the term ‘polycentrism’ to indicate a form of political organization for the Soviet Union in which individual nations would interact with each other as a network of equals. This idea stood in stark contrast to the existing Stalinist mode of interaction where everything had to go through a central party organization. Togliatti’s principle of polycentrism could be used on the much small-
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er scale of the city of Moscow to guide a new organization of nodes in the city as independent, discrete entities. The Voronoi territory map suggests a municipal political organization where each territory belongs to its nearest Metro station. Each territory could be replanned with a heightened unique identity and a heightened focus on having the full spectrum of urban routines: dwelling, office, retail, recreation, and mobility. The efficient and direct connections offered by Metro lines among themselves could be a basis for organization or alliances along each individual line. Within the city center, this method of analysis yields a complicated patchwork of territories, each with its own unique characteristics and ambitions. The next steps would be to specifically define criteria for how to propose changes to the city that would take advantage of this analysis, perhaps by building software based on a GPS platform. Urban planners could use it to give analytical weight to their schemes. Real estate developers could use it to understand their markets and guide the placement of their projects. The local government could use it to adjust their municipal sub-boundaries and to direct their resources to the most useful places. Compared to many other cities, Moscow has much more of a vibrant diversity of identities and urban conditions, each of which can be associated with distinct Metro nodes. To intelligently influence the future progression of Moscow, we need to get beyond superficial appearances and understand the deep inner mechanisms of how it works as a nodal city.
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1934 Poster: “Entire Moscow is engaged in building the Metro. Let us complete the frst line of the world’s best Metro for the 17th anniversary of the October Revolution”
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Non-Routine James Schrader
Every time I go somewhere new by Metro in Moscow, I feel overwhelmingly lost. Even if I’ve meticulously planned out my route and know exactly on which corner of which street my destination is, this sense of complete disorientation is inevitable. The train’s brakes screech almost deafeningly as we pull into the station. The doors jerk open, and I step out of the train onto the platform. I’m surrounded by the worn-out glory of grandiose mid-century Soviet station design, with shiny gold ornamentation and circular lights above spewing out what is meant to be artificial sunlight but of course doesn’t change over the course of the day. I’m deep underground, maybe 50 meters below the surface, and have no idea which direction I’m facing.
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Above me are way-finding signs with typography reminiscent of an indifferent bureaucracy from a bygone era, slightly swinging from the breeze created by the departing train. I can read enough Russian to understand what the signs say, but the names of the streets and landmarks they are pointing to mean nothing to me. I mull over which end of the platform to walk towards. All the others arriving here seem to know where they are going. As I’m pushed aside by the crowd, my primitive spatial instincts take control: I’m on the green Zamoskvoretskaya Line at Mayakovskaya station, travelling away from the city center. My friend’s apartment where I’m heading for a party is north-west of the station, so I should walk along the platform in the same direction as the departing train. There’s an escalator at the end of the platform, which perversely goes even farther down into the earth. I ride down it, then have to turn right, left, right, and right again. There are so many turns that, again, I have no clue which direction I’m facing. Then there’s a long escalator going upwards: three parallel moving stairways with glowing vertical torches like nothing else in the world. The station is so deep underground that it seems to take hours to ascend. On the ceiling above the top of the escalator there’s a huge mosaic of a blue sky with a few cumulonimbus clouds and a single black bird flying in the center. I still feel like I’m underground, though I can’t possibly still be very deep. I have to turn right, walk a little bit, then up a single flight of stairs. Suddenly, there’s daylight peering in from the clerestory windows above the end of the stairs. This must be the surface of the Earth. I turn to the right and push through a heavy, unwieldy door. Now there’s full sunlight and the smell of fresh air punctuated by car exhaust fumes. An urban boulevard that’s been hijacked by eight lanes of traffic unfolds in front of me, blocking my way. This must be the famous Tverskaya Ulitsa. And I know that my friend’s place is a few hundred meters northwest along this street. But which way is northwest? The city isn’t giving me any clues. Again, my instincts take control. It’s nine o’clock in the evening and the sun should be setting somewhere between the south and the southwest. The sun is directly in front of me, so I need to turn right. After a few minutes’ walking, with speeding car traffic mere centimeters away from me, I spot my friend’s house, a heavily ornamented 1950s Stalinist block. But it’s on the other side of the huge boulevard and there’s no zebra crossing in sight. I guess I’ll have to keep walking until I can find an underground passageway, one of the common but never quite common enough Moscow ‘perehods’, to get to the other side. Now I’m running late. I hope the party waits for me.
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Carrier
Moscow is the megacity, known for enormous traffic jams by day and especially during rush hours. In the daytime Moscow is stuck in congestion and you can hardly move in a car, but at night it can easily ‘breathe’ and the whole city can be driven through in half an hour (it can take up to 2-3 hours to do the same during the day). by Vitaliy Avdyeyev
Moscow roads during the rush hour
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For a long time, night-time activities were oppressed by the elites and authorities. At the time of tsarist rule, only elites used the night for leisure purposes, while regular peasants didn’t think about doing anything at night except sleeping. During the Russian Empire, balls and other varieties of night entertainment would happen any day of the week and a sign of a successful person with high status was the ability to sleep during the day on any day of the week. In the times of the USSR this culture reversed. The night was reserved for sleeping only and in this sense it was sacred; breaking the night rest would have been unaccepted by the general public and the state. Right after the collapse of Soviet Union the monopoly of the state on the night vanished and people started to invade the night time again. The daily routine of a successful person significantly changed compared to 100 years ago; today, a successful person works a lot and has time to rest and socialize. In this regard, the weekend became the time when people could afford to party the whole night and sleep till noon. But what is “the night”? “Moscow Night” In our culture, the night is generally defined as the dark side of the day. Since ancient times the night was associated with danger and evil. At night all the paranormal rituals were performed by the light of the moon. Ghosts, vampires and werewolves also appear only at night time. Almost every culture has myths where the night is shown as a cover for evil. Next to metaphysical descriptions it is possible to, technically, divide the 24-hour day into day time and night time. It is not constant and changes due to calendar day, latitude, longitude and time zone. In Russia, and Moscow in particular, night time can be distinguished in three additional ways. Linguistically, the day in Russian language is divided into four parts: night time (0:00-3:59), morning time (4:00-11:59), day time (12:00-17:59) and evening time (18:00-23:59). For alcohol consumption, the night time starts at 11pm and finishes at 8am, since, according to Russian Federation law, within this period of time shops are not allowed to sell alcohol. For getting around in the city the Metro is an extremely important transport mode in Moscow’s life and many Muscovites define the night in terms of Metro working hours, which is closed from 1 am to 5.30 pm. Thus in the core of the night (1:00-3:59) no alcohol is sold in stores and no Metro is working, while all night bars and night clubs are opened. Megavillage Moscow At night, Moscow metaphorically turns from a megacity into megavillage. As workers rush in the morning to the offices in the central part of the city, so night owls at the end of the day rush to the center for meeting friends, dancing, drinking and other activities that can’t bear the sunlight. This megavillage has a different sized population depending on the day of the week and the time of year. According to Federico Parolotto and Davide Boazzi’s article ‘Gridlock, the Donut and Intelligent Solutions’ in the book Archaeology of Periphery, within the boundaries of the designated Moscow Ring Road (MKAD), 90% of Muscovites live in the area between the MKAD and the Third Ring. At the same time 70% of all job places and 65% of the leisure facilities (bars, restaurants and nightclubs) are located within the Third Ring. So during
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the day time people commute to work and back home and this is known as commuting migration. At night, especially on the weekend, Muscovites show pretty much the same pattern in moving from periphery to the city center, but for leisure migration. Additionally to that intensity heat map in Yandex, the taxi report “Taxi in Moscow” (November 2013) says that at night most of the orders come from the center to the periphery and vice versa. For many Muscovites weekend party or a glass of wine/beer after work with friends became somehow a new ritual of relaxation. Some people have to work at night (service providers) and some use the night for socializing (consumers). According to a January 2014 Yandex report, which analyzed Russian companies’ working hours, 8 percent of all companies work in Moscow at night in the year. Obviously, most of them are bars, restaurants, nightclubs, petrol stations, grocery stores and flower shops. However, among this number, there are such unusual places for non-Muscovites as jewelry stores, sports stores, book stores, post offices, notaries and pawn shops. The consumers visit bars and night clubs and they are the drinkers and dancers, smokers and spectators and players. Bartenders, waiters, strip dancers, and other members of staff provide the service for those who are willing to spend their money and relax. Policemen, cleaners, prostitutes, shop assistants and of course taxi drivers also belong to service providers and play an important role of facilitating Moscow night life. At night Moscow creates unique conditions, where the nightlife routine became possible. This is the underworld time of mysterious night-owl protagonists, invisible and undiscovered to most of us.
How Do Night Owls Move Around? Night Public Transport Currently, 9 night public transport routes across a total of 177 kilometers operate in Moscow. They connect the central districts of Moscow with areas on the periphery by using the main radial streets. 5 of 9 routes begin their work at midnight and end at 5:45 am. The rest are at about the same time range with a half an hour range. The Department of Transport in Moscow estimates 1,000-1,500 passengers as the daily capacity for the whole night public transport. History Of Night Transport In Moscow Daytime public transport was introduced in Moscow at the end of 19th century, while it took until 1964 for night public transport routes to be introduced. Ten routes linked bus stations, railway stations and interchange nodes of central part of the city with bedroom suburbs, operated by iconic ‘RAF’ shuttle buses. Surprisingly enough, at a time when nightlife was virtually nonexistent in the USSR, the night transport network was much more developed than it is now. City borders were moved to Moscow Ring Road (MKAD) only in 1960 and before that area of Moscow was 360 sq km and
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length of routes in 1964 equaled 80 kilometers1. After the collapse of the Soviet Union night public transport in Moscow entirely disappeared until 2004, when the city authorities decided to experiment with adding 5 public transport routes at night. Because of a negligible amount of passengers the experiment was considered a failure and halted in 2006. In August 2013 the Moscow authorities decided to implement night public transportation again by introducing 9 bus routes that would serve the entire city of Moscow. Night Public Transport Around The Globe Moscow’s mayor, Sergey Sobyanin, repeatedly talked about the high ambitions of the Russian capital in his speeches. “[A] new wave of Moscow development will help it to fulfill its global potential and become one of the global megacities among New York, Tokyo, London, and Paris. Moscow should become a comfortable global megacity,” he said at the World Political Forum in Yaroslavl on 7 September 2011. During the day, Moscow is able to match these three cities in terms of public transport, yet at night the comparison is farfetched. With 9 night routes, Moscow is seriously behind Paris (48 routes), London (52 routes) and New York (105 routes + metro). Taxi Where Moscow differs from these three cities, and where it might indeed be considered a megacity, is in the scale of its night taxi service. The most important role of night transportation for Moscow nightlife is played by taxis, which position themselves between private car and public transport. The taxi is a personal vehicle, which can be rented with a driver for a short period of time. This type of transport is the most popular among users of the night and it has a considerable history of operating in Moscow. Taxi History Horse cabs can be called the prototype of the modern taxi. It started at the end of the XVI century, when peasants from the surrounding villages with their own horses and sledges started to come to Moscow in winter. As there was no public transport at that time peasants took on the role of taxi drivers to make a living. At the same time there were official sledge drivers who were paying a particular amount of money to the city for the opportunity to stand next to the theaters. So peasants at that time played the role of informal taxis. However, taxis in Moscow in the conventional sense of the word2 appeared only in 1908 and were represented by the French car brand Peugeot. After the Soviets came to power, the number of taxis increased significantly and this type of transportation became much more affordable than before the revolution. Nevertheless, horse cabbies left the streets of Moscow only in 1938 with the introduction of the card system for goods, which was planned only for citizens, but not for horses.
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now 900 sq km within MKAD and 177 km of night routes a motor vehicle licensed to transport passengers in return for payment of a fare and typically fitted with a taximeter (Oxford dictionary)
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Taxi use peak in the postwar period, when the GAZ factory began producing vehicles used exclusively as taxis. After the war the inherent attributes of the Soviet taxi appeared: check board pattern and green beacon on the windshield, indicating whether the driver is free or not. During Soviet times taxi drivers were well respected and somehow played the role of informal KGB agents as they knew what to show to foreign people and what to avoid. Also they knew where to get imported tape recorders, jeans, watches and other products, which couldn’t be bought in the shop. Perestroika and the collapse of the Soviet Union became significant for taxis and had a lot of influence on the current state of affairs. During Perestroika taxi drivers began to give a ride to Muscovites for money (bombit). Smoking drivers were ok to take the payment for the trip in the form of a pack of Marlboro cigarettes. The collapse of the USSR and the first years of the new Russia massively introduced the concept of gypsy taxi or bombila. All this took place during the process of mass motorization of the population, which enabled people to freely buy a personal car. Unemployment and immigration were the two major driving forces of bombilas. The Russian Federation economical default in 1998, and the world financial crisis of 2008, coincide with the biggest number of illegal taxi drivers. Every crisis and increased unemployment in Moscow has been characterized by an increase in the number of illegal taxi drivers, who have lost their usual work and wanted to earn real money. Nowadays, a large-scale campaign against illegal taxi drivers is ongoing in Moscow. Local drivers are compelled to obtain a five-year license and subsequent legalization. When the 40,000th taxi license was issued in April 2014, the head of Moscow Department of Transport, Maxima Liksutov, commented that the number of illegal taxi drivers has decreased significantly, from 40,000 in 2010 to 15-20,000 in 2014. Types of Taxi Driver At night cars get a lot of freedom and dozens of taxis, the most convenient means of transportation in the city after midnight, go to the city streets. The taxi is a kind of driverless car that can be rented for relatively small amount of money. Most taxi drivers work in the evening and at night because people can easily move on night roads, without wasting time and money because of congestion, and because of the lack of public transport. The taxi driver knows the city better than anyone else and for a passenger he can be a navigator, companion and guide. He can also show where to find a prostitute, a shop that sells illegal alcohol or a bar that is still open. One can distinguish between three types of night taxi drivers: nomads, settlers, and on demands. Nomads never stand still. They constantly roam the streets of Moscow because of their safety model (when you move it’s harder to track and catch you), and search for clients. Nobody knows where they are, but almost certainly they know where you are. This type of taxi driver reacts faster than anyone else on the current demand. If a nightclub or a large bar opens anywhere, the same day nomadic taxi drivers will be periodically passing by looking for clients. Nomads are often informal and sometimes unsafe. They are operated mostly by immigrant drivers and with cars brought from the Baltic countries to avoid pay-
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ment of transportation tax and road control fines. The price for a ride is always much lower than with other types of taxi, but you should not forget to bargain. They probably do not know how to drive to the address you name, but they know very well all the crowded places of Moscow at night. Settlers do not like to ride around the city without a passenger. They consider this nomadic behavior ungrateful and wasteful. These taxi drivers settle on the most profitable points, including the end of metro stations, railway stations and nightclubs. They are lazy and only sufficient payment, which is often at least two times higher than the price from the nomads, will encourage them to drive you. Legal taxi drivers say that this group comprises half of the licensed taxi drivers and half of illegal immigrants. Each driver pays a ‘fee’ for admission to such an exclusive profitable place. Subspecies of settlers are regional taxi drivers who stand near all Metro stations outside the Moscow central area. Usually they are residents of the adjacent sleeping districts and always settle in the same place. Their earn money by giving a ride from the metro station to the housing block for a relatively small price (around 150 rubles). On demand taxi drivers work with the help of internet applications or walkie-talkie radio. They receive an order and, after finishing it, wait for the next one. This group consists mainly of licensed taxi drivers. Waiting for the next order may be accompanied with a violation of the parking law as within the Garden Ring free parking is possible only in the designated parking areas. In all other cases, you need to pay for parking or ‘accidentally’ cover the license plate with paper. Roles In Nightlife Carriers And Their Coexistence Due to price, the level of legalization and informal support, nomads are destined to be on the lowest rung of Moscow’s taxi hierarchy and consequently payment for their service is the lowest. They fight aggressively for clients and may even start to yell if anyone is ungentlemanly enough to steal their client. They are highly disliked by all other types of taxi driver, who claim that driving with them appears to be insecure due to bad car condition and their bad understanding of the city outside the Garden Ring. However, they still fill their particular niche and they will approach you the fastest if your hand is raised, if necessary by breaking a couple of Highway Code rules. Taxi drivers on-call stand on the next stage of this hierarchy. These drivers are considered to be the most peaceful and the safest. They don’t pick up passengers at the curb and prefer to wait for the next call. The highest level is taken by the settled taxi drivers, who have tight connections with the mafia. They pay for their place, get a decent amount of money from clients and in a way have a stable job. Night buses, trolleybuses and trams do not compete with the taxi drivers. Their target audience covers migrants and young people for whom, serendipitously, the public transport route can take them home.
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Taxi vs. Night Public Transport Moscow has different means of transportations at night, but only taxis could be called Moscow’s night public transport and are the safest and the most beneficial mode of mobility after midnight. This can be explained in several ways. According to the sociologist David Gratian article Urban Nightlife, Social Capital, and the Public Life of Cities, pub crawlers who move from bar to bar make the streets safer. Taxi drivers, by being nomads or by transporting people from one place to another at night, make these streets safer as, in a way, they carry out surveillance. Moscow’s harsh winter climate, which is the third in the list of the coldest capitals in the world (after Astana and Ulan-Bator)3, also needs to be taken in consideration. Even assuming that the network of public transport will eventually be the most developed and cover the entire city, the time period between buses at night increases to half an hour and if one misses a bus, one would wait 30 long, cold minutes at the bus stop. Taxis in this sense can pick up passengers much faster. Personal safety is another advantage of the taxi over public transport. Night buses, trams or trolleybuses are closed capsules, which at night can transport a group of people. Since the nightlife is often tied with alcohol consumption, certain groups of people can get caught up in group fights or attack innocent passengers. On the Easter holiday, at 0:50am, I witnessed a drunken attack on a male passenger by a separate group of people, who shot him in the head with a traumatic gun and stabbed him in the stomach. As an “unmanned” vehicle that can be rented for a while, the taxi can avoid this sort of scenario. Taxi drivers are one of the most sociable groups of people. They know many urban rumors and are willing to share them with anyone wishing to chat. Taxi driving is often not their primary profession; they were either previously engaged in another activity or now work during the day in their profession and drive in the evening and at night to making an additional income. Unlike public transport, in a taxi you have someone to talk to (unless you don’t want to communicate). Scientists estimate driverless cars to appear widely in 10-15 years in Western world and 20-25 in developing countries. So maybe Moscow has to wait only a couple of decades more to have romantic night rides and talks before cars become robotized. Endangered Species Sticking to the metaphor of the animal kingdom while observing Moscow’s night transportation, one can point out the nomads as endangered species. The absolute majority of Muscovites do not like the nomad-bombilas. Nowadays the state is directed against them in order to squeeze them out of the market. However, these kinds of informal phenomena are most effective because of the absence of a top-down approach. Nomadic taxi drivers build their night route according to popular places. Some of them make a very complex system out of their route, including visiting railway stations at the exact time a train pulls in. 3
WorldClimate.com
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International experience shows that full legalization of taxis eventually could lead to a serious rise of the cost of a license. For example, in Paris, at the moment the cost of a license for one car is 200,000euros; in Istanbul, it is $650,000; and in New York licenses are sold at auction for $1 million. This may lead to cartel agreements and a consequent increase in cost per ride.
Level of car mobility increases at night
Problem, Opportunity, Peculiarity Diverse means of transportation occupy and use night roads in Moscow. They have their own models of behavior, ways of using the space and impact on the night city. Moscow’s taxi world shows a perfect model of how formal and informal economies can stimulate each other. Informal taxis are known to be a problem for monopolies and cartels, but by being the only opposition to them they are the only deterrent from price rise. And price rise could lead to a decrease in night mobility, as if bombilas leave Moscow’s roads, prices will inevitably grow, which will lead to people not using taxis. Nomads are actually a big opportunity for Muscovites as they can be found on every relatively big road. There is no need to remember complicated night bus routes as the Moscow citizen’s mental map shows where the routes of the nomads are. Informal taxis are one of the city’s biggest peculiarities, as almost nowhere else in the world is it so easy to find a cab on the street at night. Along with nomads, settlers and on-demands appear to be the mysterious protagonists of an undiscovered underworld of the Moscow night, who become important characters of Muscovites’ night routine and who in a way symbolize nightlife in the city.
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District distribution of night clubs and bars
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Night public transport network and city borders in 1964 and 2013
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Length of routes during the day and night
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Nomad in search of a client
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145 Complex routes of night nomadic taxi drivers
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From 1986 to 2014 by Vitaly Avdeev Based on ‘Blast from the Past’ movie plot
Yevgeni Yelizarov is a nuclear physicist, living during the start of Perestroika in the USSR. His extreme fear of a nuclear holocaust leads him to build an enormous self-sustaining fallout shelter beneath his dacha. 146 146
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Chernobil explodes, Yevgeni, his pregnant wife Victoria, and his brother Alexander move into the shelter. A pilot loses control of his airplane and ejects; the plane crashes into the Yelizarov home and destroys it, leaving their friends and family to believe the Yelizarovs have died. The locks on the shelter are timed to open in 28 years and cannot be overridden by anyone inside or outside the shelter — for their own protection, according to Yevgeni. During the 28 years they are in the shelter, the world above drastically changes, while the Yelizarovs’ life remains frozen in 1986. Alexander, who was 20 in 1986 and enjoyed dancing, is mastering new moves and dreaming about the prominent communist future. The family passes time watching black and white films and kinescopes of television programs via a projector rigged to look like a television. In 2014, the timer releases the locks, and Yevgeni ascends to the surface in full protective gear. The suburb in which they once lived has turned into the Third Ring Road of Moscow, which Yevgeni mistakes for a post-apocalyptic world. He wants his wife and brother to stay in hiding while he collects supplies. When he suffers from chest pain, Alexander is sent for supplies in his stead. Alexander is unfamiliar with the lifestyle and slang of 2014 and unaware of the value of money. He meets a girl, Larisa, and she is amused by him. Alexander meets Larisa’s gay housemate and best friend, Stas, who is amused by Alexander’s naivety but offers advice, gives Alexander a fashion makeover and wants to show him Moscow’s nightlife. Larisa and Stas decide to take Alexander to a nightclub, but at first he doesn’t want to leave the house after midnight because night is time for sleep. They persuade Alexander and catch an illegal taxi on street. On the way they see street racers overtaking them at high speed and making dangerous moves. Next to the night club Alexander sees a long line of people and he thinks that clothes and food can now be bought at night, but Larisa and Stas are laughing at him. After entering the club Alexander hears strange music, but decides to show his mastered moves. They are amazed by his dancing skills, with which he immediately gains the attention of several desirable women. Larisa kisses Alexander and he tells her the truth about his past and states that he wants to take her “underground”. She doesn’t believe him and invites him to her place. Stas is forgotten. On their way in the night taxi they stop and enter a 24/7 supermarket. Alexander is so astonished by the variety of products and lack of queues that it takes some time for Larisa to take him away. In the morning Alexander realizes that everything that happened to him was true and makes a proposal to Larisa, but she calls a team of mental health professionals to have him committed. He sadly cooperates at first, but escapes as they leave the house. Larisa realizes that she has feelings for Alexander, tracks him down and throws herself into his arms. He takes her to meet his parents. Alexander tells his parents that he and Larisa can’t stay in a shelter. He asks them to set the lock timer for only two months this time, and then he will return for them. He and Larisa use the money from selling copper and golden wire to build his parents a new home in the country, identical to the home that was destroyed. Alexander privately breaks the news to Yevgeni that there was no nuclear war, and that the Soviet Union has collapsed without a shot being fired. Victoria is overjoyed to be able to see the sky again; Alexander and Larisa become engaged to be married.
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by Sabina Maslova
Inhabitants and visitors in Moscow are all pedestrians first. Even a driver becomes a pedestrian as soon as s/he gets out of the car. While pedestrians comprise the most numerous constituent of the city’s traffic1, Moscow’s Department of Transport attributes the highest priority to carsA . Yet only less than a third of Moscow’s population owns a carB2 . → [see fig. 1 ]
It is striking to see that Moscow’s leading map service provider, Yandex, which is designed to provide the most accurate traffic information for cars and public transport, doesn’t offer directions and journey times for pedestrians. As elements of pedestrian infrastructure, the numerous pedestrian underpasses and overpasses illustrate that the main player on the roads is the car, while people on foot have to find their way using bypasses under and over the ground. The city of Moscow is totally negligent towards its pedestrians. People have to struggle with a hostile environment, trying to weave their way through the traffic. This investigation aims to help pedestrians discover a number of unprecedented advantages from within this harsh daily reality.
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Daytime population of Moscow varies from 16 to 18 mln people. Daytime population composed of permanent residents and additional population, which includes visitors from Moscow region towns and areas coming with labor, cultural and everyday purposes and temporary population (tourists, city guests, transit passengers, etc.). According to GIBDD (State Inspection for Road Traffic Safety), 5 mln cars were registered in Moscow in 2013.
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From Shared To Divided From a legal perspective, pedestrians are considered to be not only those traveling on foot, but those on bicycles and motorbikes, or pulling a sled or a cart, too3. → [see fig. 2]
With the growing number of cars, it has become important to think of safe areas for pedestrians with enough comfortable space. The understanding of the needs of pedestrians came to Russia relatively late. This process represents the typical dynamics of developing transport system. Segregation of space on the road by installing curbs, road surface markings, traffic signs, implementing traffic regulations and other demarcations between vehicles and pedestrians is introduced to increase safety, road capacity and control the speed modes. Only 100 years ago every city was car-freeC. In the 19th century when the cars didn’t yet exist on the roads of Moscow, all the space on the road was mixed and occupied with horses, carriages, carts and even trading places. Road-sharing was common. With the introduction of the car, the difference in speed on the road increased by more than 12 times4. Gradually, for reasons of safety, the space on the road was separated into two zones — with cars and without. → [see fig. 3]
As the number of cars continued to grow rapidly, the segregation of the road space has been further elaborated, and by 20105 had resulted in an unevenly distributed, car-oriented space. However, the latest initiatives and current strategies of the city governmentD show that the direction towards a more balanced system has been chosen, further favoring the separation of space, by allocating equal priority for each traffic user, so that not only pedestrians have their section on the road, but also the cyclists and public transport. This is how one of the major principles of successful management — ‘divide and rule’ — which is practised in many European countries, is being implemented in Moscow. With the coexistence of the divided parallel flows, no major problems occur. Possible conflict zones can appear when the flows intersect. As a solution to avoid the conflicts in intersection points, pedestrian architecture was created: zebra crossings, underpasses, overpasses. However, their network is unevenly distributed across the city, and it doesn’t provide opportunities for pedestrians to cross busy highways everywhere. In the city center, intersections in the divided space have been improved, but in large areas on the periphery, the shortage of these elements has become more evident. → [see fig. 4, 5]
Divided In Space Division of the space between vehicle traffic and pedestrians can be implemented as a strategy not only in the section of a road, but also on the scale of the city. Some zones, such as MKAD and the Third Ring Road, have almost no pedestrian infrastructure and 3 4 5
According to the Chapter 1 of Traffic Regulations of Russia, a pedestrian is “person on the road outside of the vehicle who doesn’t produce any construction works”. Pedestrians include people traveling on wheelchairs, riding bicycle/motorbike/motorcycle, pulling a sled/cart/buggy. Assuming average pedestrian speed 5 kph, of car – 60 kph. In 2010 Sergey Sobyanin was assigned to the position of the mayor of Moscow and afterwards he has significantly changed transport development strategies of the city.
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represent mostly destinations for car users. As a pedestrian, it is only possible to feel unhampered by cars in certain isolated areas, which can be reached only by personal or public transport. The most extreme vision of car-free zones in the city is pedestrianonly streets. In Moscow they appeared rather late; before 2011 the city had just one pedestrian-only street — Arbat. → [see fig. 6]
Since then the number of these spaces has increased significantly and the total length of pedestrian-only streets in the city center will reach 18.8kmE by 2014. Other zones, where cars are not welcome and one can experience being a pedestrian and walk, relax, shop and meet people, are huge shopping malls, airports and public parks. → [see fig. 7]
These types of pedestrian environments have many common features: several crossing streets, public squares (sometimes with a fountain or a skating rink), and no dead ends. The division of space looks similar: narrow streets; a high density of people in the center; shops and cafes towards the edges; many benches, lights, greenery and rubbish bins; expensive paving material. → [see fig. 8]
In pedestrian-only streets, malls and airports, the dominant function is commercial, whereas in public parks the dominant space is green. However, spatially divided pedestrian areas still represent only a few isolated car-free islands, and this concept can’t be applied to the whole city. → [see fig. 9]
Pedestrian environments are created for a certain group of users — people walking plus shopping. But there is a much larger section of users, beyond flaneurs and shoppers, who use the city to travel with a purpose, transferring from point A to point B in a certain period of time, and this issue relates to pedestrian mobility in the city. This second group of users has other requirements for space, which include time spent to cover the distance, continuity of the movement, and the quality of the surroundings. Everything Else Is Shared? Spaces only for cars form a sort of car city, where the role of the capital is taken by MKAD; and the considerably smaller space of Moscow can be attributed to the car-free city with its pedestrian capital in Arbat. These two poles are extremes. The relationship between cars and pedestrians in between these two worlds is unclear. Is it a shared space? → [see fig. 10]
In Western countries, shared space came after the segregation of the road to raise people’s awareness and encourage mutual respect by removing the demarcation between vehicles and pedestrians. The highest priority is given to people and children and attention on the cars is minimal. Generally in Western countries shared space is the exception to the rule of segregated space. On the contrary, in Moscow undefined shared space is not an exceptional phenomenon, but a general concept for the largest part of the city.
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It is assumed that in Moscow ‘shared’ space is created by cars taking over space from people on the sidewalks, in the yards, near the bus stops and metro exits. But the opposite is also true — pedestrians often use car roads instead of the sidewalk and cross the road at inappropriate places. And if in an absolutely regulated transport system of segregated elements this wouldn’t be possible, in Moscow this weird shared space gives more freedom of movement to walking people and helps overcome the obstacles of the poorly designed pedestrian system. In the periphery of Moscow the concept of shared spaces is represented even more widely. It consists of a large number of shared residential yards and shared sidewalks, which are disconnected by wide impassable highways. In this sense the periphery, with its wide roads, can be compared to Venice with its channels. Highways are similar to channels and pedestrian crossings are the bridges over these channels. Just as Venice is pedestrian within the islands, Moscow has shared space for pedestrians within its micro-districts. → [see fig. 11]
On the street scale, an inverse reality can sometimes be observed: cars are structurally parked over the sidewalks and people walk on the road. → [see fig. 12]
Sharing of space with cars is not the main threat to pedestrians per se; it is in reality pedestrians’ major non-manifested quality, their primary source. In many places informal self-organized shared areas, where informal laws work quite effectively, turn into a bigger advantage for people travelling by foot in Moscow. It is mostly relevant to the second group of users – people who travel from point A to point B — who can minimize their commute time by using direct routes without extra bypassing. This quality of Moscow’s shared space is a certain way of adaptation to the imperfect and fragmented system of segregated space. By sharing space, vehicles and the pedestrians also share the speed, compared to the divided model of flows of different speed, shared space is in a way safer because of that. Copying Western models of divided space does work, but it will take decades or even longer to transform the whole of Moscow according to Western pedestrian guidelines, and it will also reduce the diversity of pedestrian infrastructure’s forms to a minimum, resulting in an uncountable number of signs, sidewalks, crossings, etc. There is a way to identify and use hidden local advantages of pedestrian spaces. The idea for a possible future of pedestrians in the city is to start appreciating existing examples of shared structures. The main necessity is to switch the reality by changing the priority in key controversial areas of cars-pedestrians coexistence. Simply putting the sign of a shared space in all de-facto shared yards can initiate the improvement of the current situation. As with yards, similar actions can be performed with other already informally shared locations — sidewalks. Shared zones of sidewalks, yards, forbidden parking and unauthorized crossings are negatively perceived in Moscow; meanwhile they appear quite common from the outside.
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So the situation can be improved only by changing the perspective, by admitting and accepting the existing qualities. The actual conditions are already there; now a shift in opinion is needed. Potential For Sharing The potential of shared space for people in Moscow is huge. Starting with yards in micro-districts, changes can be applied to almost 60% of the city area6. The remaining percentage can be fixed by dealing with shared sidewalks, and the rest will get fixed with the continuing segregation policy. The area of Moscow occupied by the roads comprises only 8.4% of the total area, whereas in American cities (New York, Los Angeles), the figure is 35%, and in Europe (Paris, London, Munich), 20-25%. There is no space to widen the roads or build new ones, therefore we will have to effectively share the existing roads, zones, and share roads both in space and in time. To face the existing functioning patterns and informalities of the pedestrian environment and embody the potential qualities of its space would define new levels of improvement for pedestrians and city mobility.
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Estimations based on the map of microrayons from Archeology of Periphery, 2013
References: A B C D
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Department of Transport and Road Infrastructure Development of Moscow, Presentation for Moscow Urban Forum (04/12/12) http://foxtime.ru/news-view/v-moskve-rastet-kolichestvo-mashin Carfree Cities, by J.H. Crawford State Program of Moscow “Strategy for the Development of Transport System in 2012-2016” (http://s.mos.ru/common/upload/ transport_gos_programma_depr_i_df1.pdf) Department of Transport and Road Infrastructure (http://dt.mos.ru/Doc/itogi2013_plans_2014.pdf)
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fig. 1: Hierarchy on the road and the number of users
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fig. 2: A Pedestrian
fig. 3: Evolution of the road space
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fig. 8: Value of pavements
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Front entrance of the residential building: benches, rubbish cans, fenced off greenery, parked cars – no sidewalk planned
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Residential yard, sign of children crossing road but no crossing marking
Desperately narrow sidewalk (<0.5m), separated with fence from traffic, on the other side — with curb from greenery, lamppost in the middle Long sidewalks end up with no crossing around, need to go back and a 10min loop to continue the route
27/04/2014 11:23
27/04/2014 11:37
27/04/2014 11:41
#inverse
Typical yard with inverse reality: cars parked on the sidewalks, people use man road to get around
27/04/2014 10:40
5554
#pos
5553
D-
Trace from pedestrian zone ends up with no crossing available around on the traffic road
27/04/2014 10:38
D->S
tags
Image code
Divided/ Shared Index
Image
Observations
Date, time
№ 8.1.
№ 8.1 C GO!
Divided Space
â&#x2014;?
Shared Space
â&#x2014;?
Image
Transparent pedestrian yard with paved and fenced pedestrian street. Wide enough to be used by car, more street furniture as precautious measures No cars in the yard, people with children actively use traffic road
Observations
27/04/2014 12:08
Date, time
Construction works on the sidewalk, no alternative route provided for people
27/04/2014 11:57
27/04/2014 12:06
Pedestrian overpass, well-constructed, but takes too long to use
Weird cube as street furniture. Probably to prevent car parking on the sidewalk
27/04/2014 11:51
27/04/2014 11:42
Divided Space
5593
Image code
Divided/ Shared Index
5592
5585
5580
5576
S+
D+
D-
D+
D+
tags
#yard
#yard
#sidewalk
#overpass
#streetfurniture
Field Diary Pocket Article
161
161
162
162
●
Shared Space
●
#pos
#shared
#shared #sidewalk
5607
5611
5613
D+
S+
S+
Pedestrian unpaved street parallel to the main road, looks like park
Square near the metro entrance, shared between cars, people going and standing, cyclists, taxis
Wide shared sidewalk, example of self-organized parking
27/04/2014 12:50
27/04/2014 13:19
27/04/2014 13:49
#sidewalks
Woman walking out of the bus with stick for Nordic walking. As the paving is of bad quality uses them to help with walking
27/04/2014 12:48
5602
#sharedyard
5597
S+
First met sign of shared space (residential zone), pointing the entrance to the yard
27/04/2014 12:34
S+
tags
Image code
Divided/ Shared Index
Image
Observations
Date, time
№ 8.1 C GO!
Divided Space
â&#x2014;?
Shared Space
â&#x2014;?
Image
Pedestrian street through the yards with intense retail
People crossing the street without using pedestrian crossing
Observations
27/04/2014 14:31
Date, time
Parked cars on the wide sidewalk create a protective shield for people from traffic
27/04/2014 14:23
27/04/2014 14:26
Street furniture is used for fencing off space on the wide sidewalk
Underpass crossing with street art
27/04/2014 14:10
27/04/2014 14:05
Divided Space
5655
Image code
Divided/ Shared Index
5644
5628
5625
5615
S+
D+
S+
S+
D+
tags
#crossing
#pos
#sidewalk
#streetfurniture
#underpass
Field Diary Pocket Article
163
163
164
164
●
Shared Space
●
#pos
#inverse
#pos
5687
PH1
D->S
D+S
Sidewalks are full of parked cars, person uses main road
Well-designed pedestrian street with one lane of traffic open on weekdays
27/04/2014 15:01
27/04/2014 15:31
#shared #sidewalk
5674
5666
D+
S+
#pos
5657
S+
Road is occupied by grocery market, no cars, plenty of people
Sign of the shared space on the sidewalk. Pointing out the entrance to the yard, but can be used precisely here
tags
Image code
Divided/ Shared Index
Observations
Pedestrian tunnel on the surface
Image
27/04/2014 14:45
27/04/2014 14:37
27/04/2014 14:33
Date, time
№ 8.1 C GO!
Divided Space
Date, time
Image
Observations
Divided/ Shared Index
Image code
tags
Field Diary Pocket Article
165
165
Detour
166
D E TO UR 167
167
Detour
168
Night
Race
by
Irina Eremenko / James Schrader
168
Night Race
Every Muscovite knows Vorobyevy Gory as a place for one of the best views over the city. Thousands of people come every day to take a look over Moscow from the height of a bird’s flight. But at night this place switches to a very different regime: it becomes a strange symbiosis of a car racetrack and a nightclub. As a group, Strelka cars studio engaged in embedded journalistic research: we tried to briefly become part of the closed community of young people who are deeply interested in cars, car racing, and tuning. There are rumors around the city about drag races being held on certain nights near Vorobyevy Gory. But nobody knows where the race is actually taking place. To find out, you need to track down and infiltrate the crowd, and then follow them to the night’s location. They say that they need to hide from the police, but of course the police all know about this and look the other way, letting the metaphorical children play their game. The whole process has a feeling of deep mystery. At Vorobyevy Gory before the race, it looks like some sort of show. Loud music from portable boomboxes accompanies two scantily-clad girls dancing with start flags. Nearby, some car trunks are open for serving hookah to spectators. An organizer is gathering the drivers and warming up the crowd. Soon, hundreds of cars move slowly along the road next to Moscow State University, one by one getting the information flier from one of the girls about the location of the race. Approximately 300 cars gather with blanking emergency lights, waiting in line to move as a convoy to the secret location of the race. It is a wonderful picture of collective consciousness when so many cars are driving together through the night, all with their emergency lights on. At first we thought nobody could get lost because everyone sticks together. But we soon found ourselves mistakenly in the parking lot of one of the Ashan malls. After ten minutes of waiting we realised our error and some new friends told us how to find the race. But again we got lost: five minutes from the final location we had to slow down for a red light because of the presence of a police officer and we lost the car in front of us. After 15 minutes of confused driving on an empty road and twenty phone calls we finally found the right place. And here the show starts! The drag races. Cars racing two by two after each swing of the beautiful girl’s flag. We used the top of a sturdy metal fence as a grandstand for watching the action. Soon, however, the lively drama of the night ended abruptly: the organizer announced that the race is over because of the police nearby. Four hours of investigation, research, and driving led us to an exciting fifteen minutes of actual racing.
169 169
Detour
170
170
Night Race
171 171
Detour
Jammed in
Traffic
Cars are one of the phenomenon imported into Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union that has caused huge changes in the city. In this short time period, the growing presence of cars has strongly influenced the daily routines in the city and the experience of being in the city.
by Giulio Margheri / 172
172
James Schrader
Jammed in Traffic
Since the end of Soviet times, the number of the cars on the streets of Moscow has risen dramatically. According to the Congestion Index created by TomTom in 2012, Moscow is considered the most gridlocked city in the world; traffic in Moscow makes an average journey 66% longer, with peaks of 106% during the morning rush and 138% during the evening rush. Compared to the Congestion Index’s other most gridlocked cities, Moscow only has 380 cars per 1000 inhabitants, while Los Angeles has 540 and Palermo has 745. One of the main causes of car congestion in Moscow is the unequal distribution of working places in the city: around 40% of jobs are concentrated in 6.5% of the territory, mostly in the city center. The vast majority of Muscovites, however, live in the periphery of the city and need to commute into the city center for work. Whether they travel by car or by Metro, workplaces being far from dwelling places creates many more trips--and longer trips-- than would be necessary if people lived closer to where they work. Another significant issue is that the quantity of roads compared to the inhabitants and surface area of the city. According to urban standards, there are three times fewer roads than there should be. An additional problem is parking spaces: there are not enough parking stalls for every car in the city, not to mention all of the cars that come into the city every day from the suburbs. This leads to improvised solutions like parking on the sidewalks--blocking pedestrian movement--and also to additional traffic from people driving in circles with their cars looking for somewhere to park. Paradoxically, Moscow authorities already spend more money on road issues than any other city in the world. According to M. Blinkin, “the problem remains because the solutions being offered are based on traditional Soviet thinking”. All these issues create a number of strange phenomena in the city. For example, because the traffic jams make it difficult to how long one’s journey will take, people often drive toward their destinations very far in advance. When they have good luck and don’t get caught in gridlock, the early arrival of commuters to work leads to a long line of cars parked in front of their destinations. Near the Moscow City business center in the early morning, a large number of smartly dressed people sleep inside their cars. Some of them have blankets, others have iPads with movies, others mugs of coffee and a mobile breakfast. In this case, the car is not just a fetish object; it has become an extension of their private homes. Cars are not just for covering distance but also a room of your house that can be taken with you. Simple trips can last far longer than one might expect. It might be a frustrating surprise for the uninitiated, but the expectation of gridlock and the reality of often moving along at a snail’s pace has simply become part of the condition of existing as a driver in Moscow.
173 173
Detour
Behind
Moscow
To exit Moscow by car is a unique experience. It gives an insight into Moscow’s hypercentralized structure, the changing city as you drive from its center to its edge, and the huge difference in landscape between Moscow and Moscow Oblast, the region behind the city border. by Olena Grankina / Roel van Herpt This trip started from the heart of Moscow and led to Kazan, the capital city of the Tatarstan Region 1.000 km East of the Moscow Kremlin. We left the familiar city center of Moscow in the early morning and moved into the direction of the megacity’s border. The radial-concentric structure of Moscow, the small size of its historic center, the city’s explosive growth in the twentieth century, decades of Socialist urban planning — all influenced the extreme development of Moscow’s periphery, which makes up 7/8th of the city. Its landscape is defined by vast microrayons: standardized housing districts with huge building blocks that have turned the periphery into the dormitory suburbs of Moscow. Its monotony and refusal to adhere the tight-knit streetscape of the ideal city makes it “non-places”.1 Vast faceless spaces that fail to provide any form of orientation in the city. They immediately start after leaving behind Moscow’s city center. The Third Ring, like the city walls of the past, creates a border inside Moscow between its diverse and multifunctional historic center and the enormous, monotonous residential landscape of the periphery. Once the car enters the peripheral zone, the road itself becomes the reference point in the landscape. It absorbs all services of the microrayons and, like a linear city, goes on for kilometers with a string of functions on both sides: recurring shopping malls, restaurants, cinemas. All is the same for a minimum of 40 minutes until the next border is reached—the MKAD.2 → [see fig. 1]
As soon as the MKAD border is crossed, the road belongs to trucks. While they are only allowed to enter the MKAD at night, during the day they are waiting in a long line on both sides of the radial road that leads into the city. This daily, hours-long truck parking is supported by all infrastructure needed: motels, cafes, restaurants, shops. At the same time, this is the moment during our trip to check whether all necessary supplies are on board — enough water, food, gasoline. After the line of trucks, ‘nothingness’ emerges. → [see fig. 2, 3]
1 2
174
174
Justin McGuirk, Life on the edge, Archeology of periphery Moscow Ring Auto Road
Behind Moscow
fig. 1
fig. 2
175 175
Detour
fig. 3
Exiting Moscow feels like exiting urbanized Russia. Suddenly empty fields and forests follow, for most of the hundreds of kilometres ahead. Here, even the road lacks a highway designation. It leads from Moscow to the next city, cutting all villages on its way into two parts. These villages almost died out. Nothing happens here, houses are blackened, their wood is decaying. The people that used to live here seem to be drawn into Moscow, into the cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s endless periphery. From this distance, in the middle of nowhere far away from the growing megacity, Moscow appears to absorb everything around, leaving nothing behind. â&#x2020;&#x2019; [see fig. 4, 5, 6]
fig. 4
176
176
Behind Moscow
fig. 5
fig. 6
177 177
RA CE: OUT
179
Glossary
180
180
Glossary!
Glossary Antropocar: An anthropometric portrait of a car.
Circuit race: A mass-start race of several laps on a closed circuit.
APC: Abbreviation of Armoured Personnel Carrier.
City: A metaplace of high density and high frequency of events.
Arbat: The first and largest pedestrian-on- Clearance: The distance between two ly street of Moscow that appeared in 1986. objects, for example between the car and road surface. Bombila: A driver who provides informal taxi services for Muscovites. Concentric city: The urban development typology of Moscow. Thoughout its history, Border: A line separating one area from radial roads that led outside Moscow were the other, in the case of Moscow separating framed by new and increasingly larger conthe city from Moscow Oblast (Moscow Re- centric rings that added land to the existgion). For most of its history, the city border ing city. All these rings share the cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s iniof Moscow was defined by defense walls. tial core: the Moscow Kremlin. In 1960, the MKAD Ring Road became the administrative border of the city. Although Continuous city: A city in which the the administrative border of the city has urbanization is spread over an even carpet been increased, the MKAD remains the across the landscape rather than concenmost important physical and mental bor- trated in places of intensity. der of the city. Cyclops: One-eyed giants from Greek and Buildup: An upward extension of an exist- Roman mythology. ing structure above a baseline. Dacha: Seasonal or year-round second Car club: A group of people who share a homes, often located in the exurbs of Ruscommon interest in motor vehicles, flour- sian and post-Soviet cities. ished in Russia on the internet in the end of the 1990s. Dashboard camera: A camera put on a carâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s dashboard or windshield to film the Car medium: A means of communication inside or outside driving process. Being between a driver, a car and an environment. imported to Russia by its active car community, it is used as the most powerful tool Cartel: A coalition or cooperative arrange- to control police violence and drivers rights ment between service providers intended in case of road accidents. to promote a mutual interest.
181
181
Glossary
Divided space: The segregation of the road space between pedestrians and traffic vehicles designed to increase safety, road capacity and speed modes. Drag race: A race between two or more cars starting from standstill. The car that accelerates fastest wins.
Inomarka: Russian slang for cars produced outside Russia.
Driving: Getting from point A to point B.
Ithaka: A Greek island, home of Odysseus.
Economic freedom: The freedom to produce, trade and consume any goods and services acquired without the use of force, fraud or theft.
Laistrygonians: A tribe of giant cannibals.
Enclave (MKAD): A portion of territory with one or more services and located next to the MKAD Ring Road. The different enclaves are only connected with each other through the ring. Exit (MKAD): A short road leading off the MKAD Ring Road, often to a (group of) service(s) located immediately along the ring. The vast amout of exits and their typical design make them the most peculiar aspect of the MKAD. Flaneur: From the French noun “flâneur”, meaning stroller, lounger, saunterer or loafer. French philosopher Baudelaire characterized the flâneur as a “gentleman stroller of city streets”. FSB: Abbreviation of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation. Garage cooperative: A type of common property ownership of residents of a multi-unit garage complex. GIS: Abbreviation of Geo-Informational Systems.
182
182
Horizontal elevator: A metaphor for describing how the Metro system is a pointto-point transportation system taking people from one node to another without addressing the inbetween space.
Leviathan: An image of a Biblical monster, used by English philosopher Thomas Hobbes to describe the autocratic state, which according to him was invented by humans as a tool of defense. Hobbes wrote that the only way to provide citizen security was to create a strong and undivided government. Magnetic: Attracting things irresistably, like how a Metro station attracts people and urban development. Megacity: A city with 10 million inhabitants minimum, which is characterized by such factors as global importance, traffic congestions, gentrification, 24 hourness and good public transport. Megavillage: A different condition of the megacity at night, where some particular factors are inactive. For example, bad night public transport makes Moscow a megavillage. Mental map: A mental representation of space and places. Metro: A system of underground trains in Moscow that swiftly moves people between its 194 stations.
Glossary!
METRO-2: An unofficial underground transportation network in Moscow, created for the fast and secure movement of state authorities. MKAD: Abbreviation of the Moscow Automobile Ring Road. A 109 km ring road that since its opening in 1962 redirects cars around the city of Moscow. Nightlife: Social activities or entertainment available at night in a city. Nodal city: A city in which much of the life and development of is organized around intense nodes of activity, such as around Metro stations. Node: The territory around a Metro station that is filled with activity related to people going to and from the station. Nomad: An unofficial taxi driver who moves around Moscow in search for passengers. Nordic walking: A walking activity that can be enjoyed both by athletes as a sport and by non-athletes as a health-promoting physical activity. The activity is performed with specially designed walking poles similar to ski poles.
Pedestrian: A person on the road outside the car. Pedestrians in Moscow include people travelling on unpowered wheelchairs, bicycles and motorcycles, and people pulling a sled, cart or buggy. Periphery: The outskirts of a city. Place: A personal, private space. Politics of real time: The concept of global world politics that was introduced by Paul Virillio in the 1960s. It describes the dominance of time over space since the beginning of the 20th century. He argued that being the global weapon developments depreciated the meaning of “where” and reinforced the question “how fast”. Polycentrism: The idea of any system, in this case a city, having multiple centers rather than one single center. POS: Abbreviation for Pedestrian-Only Street. Poseidon: Greek god of the ocean.
Post-Soviet City (MKAD): An urban typology based on car usage and multiple choices for consumption, two main cultural aspects of the period after the collapse of the USSR in 1991. See the area around the On demand: An official taxi driver in Mos- MKAD Ring Road. cow who receives orders via a dispatcher or online application system and works on Protest on wheels: A form of civic protest charters only. in the 21st century, marked by participation of drivers in a protest with their cars. The Pedestran-only street: City streets re- car movement plays a role blocking the served for pedestrian-only use and in road infrastructure on the governmental which some or all automobile traffic may way and creating the transport infrastrucbe prohibited. ture for rebels
183
183
Glossary
Release valve: Something that releases pressure into a larger vessel; for example, how Metro stations have concentrations of people that emerge into the neighborhood surrounding it. Ring road: A circular road that aims to redirect cars around a city and releave traffic flows inside the city. The four ring roads of Moscow, linked by several radial roads, make up the basic car road infrastructure of the city. From inside to outside, the ring roads are called Boulevard Ring, Garden Ring, Third Ring, and MKAD. Settler: Both official and unofficial taxi drivers who wait for passengers next to the most crowded places in Moscow.
Stops per minute: A measurement unit of driving events. Suspension: A system of springs and shock absorbers through which a vehicle can absorb bad road conditions. Typology: The comparative study of physical or other characteristics of the built environment into distinct types. Urban Boulevard (MKAD): A proposed typology for the future MKAD Ring Road. The urban boulevard is open for different means of transit, integrated in the larger transportation system of the city and Moscow region, and allows for direct access to a vast array of urban functions.
Shanghai: Russian slag for slums. A big VAZ: Abbreviation of Volzskiy Car Factory. and tight cluster of constructions, such as garages, houses and huts, sometimes at Voronoi: A mathematical system for dividdifferent levels on uneven terrain. ing space into a set of territories, the area of each being closest to a point in an array Shared space: An urban design approach of points. which seeks to minimize demarcations between vehicle traffic and pedestrians, of- World Mapping: A program started by the ten by removing features such as curbs, Soviet Union in the 1960s, aimed to map road surface markings, traffic signs and all cities in the West on scale 1:10.000 or regulations. 1:20.000 to understand their ways of offense and defense. At the same time, simiShared yard: A residential area yard lar maps of Soviet cities were not available. where pedestrians are allowed to move through the roadway and where the maxi- Wormhole: A hole in which one descends mum speed for the vehicles is 20kph. The and emerges somewhere else; for examhighest priority is given to pedestrians. ple, how a Metro station is a hole in the ground that leads you to another part of the Shed: A simple, single-storey structure city. in a back garden or on an allotment that is used for storage, hobbies, or as a workshop. Stop: ➀ A possibility for a driver to create a place. ➁ An indicator of urban activity. ➂ A tool to identify the driving city.
184
184
Glossary!
185
185
D
186
ATLAS
A T LA S D
ATLAS
187
D
ATLAS
Mobile User 3 AM
Heatmap
Within this physically continuous city, we can see diferentiation at the macro scale, with users in their homes at night clustered on the periphery of the city.
188
Source: Megafon; data processed by Alexander Ayoupov
D
ATLAS
Mobile User
Heatmap 11 AM
A daily migration occurs to the city center for work.
Source: Megafon; data processed by Alexander Ayoupov
189
D
ATLAS
Accessible Nodes
Territoryas
The 194 stations create access to the territory immediately adjacent to them. 500-meter circles are an approximation of the average distance someone would be comfortable walking to Metro. The territory accessible from each station is a â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;nodeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; of area that belongs to that station.
Legend Red-flled circles: 500m radius around metro stations.
190
Source: Moscow Metro, Google Maps, Yandex Maps
D
ATLAS
Parallel
Systems
The major roads of Moscow have the same logic as Metro of radiating out from the center. In many places, they overlap, but in others, they cover diferent territory.
Legend Orange: Major roads Grey+Red: Metro lines + 500m/1000m radius Source: Moscow Metro, Google Maps, Yandex Maps
191
D
Historic
ATLAS
Growth 1935
Over the course of the past century, Metro undergoes a continuous expansion from a single line into an extensive network.
192
Source: Moscow Metro, Google Maps, Yandex Maps
D
Historic
ATLAS
Growth 1980
Over the course of the past century, Metro undergoes a continuous expansion from a single line into an extensive network.
Source: Moscow Metro, Google Maps, Yandex Maps
193
D
ATLAS
Metro In The Space of The
Physical City 2014
Looking at the Metro in a geographic plan view allows a more accurate understanding of the spatial relationship between Metro and the city.
Legend Circles: Train stations Black stitches: Interchanges Black circles: Ring roads
194
Source: Moscow Metro, Google Maps, Yandex Maps
D
ATLAS
Future Metro is planning numerous line extensions as well as a second ring line and the integration of an underused railway ring.
Source: Moscow Metro, Google Maps, Yandex Maps
195
D
ATLAS
Future And Parks
Territory
The location of major park and natural spaces in Moscow explains why some areas are not included in Metroâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s expansion plans.
196
Source: Moscow Metro, Google Maps, Yandex Maps
D
ATLAS
Park And Ride During morning and afternoon peak hours authorities expect these parkings to be used by drivers who work in the centre. They will leave their cars here and travel to work by public transportation. At night it will be used as a regular parking by the drivers from the neighbouring area. The parking is municipal and the city authorities say charges will be low, as the enterprise isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t working for profi, but to improve traffic congestion. Around 250,000 cars come every day to the city from outside Moscow. This parkand-ride promises to be a good start in relieving congestion in the capital. The Goal to reduce the number of trips by private cars in rush hour by 33% between the MKAD and the Third Ring (need to create intercept parking for 30 000 cars); to reduce the number of trips by private cars in rush hour by 31% at the entrance to the MKAD (need to create intercept parking for 80,000 cars)
~15,000 parking spaces Now 30,000 car spaces needed between the MKAD and the Third Ring 80,000 car spaces needed at the entrance to the MKAD Source: Moscow Metro, Google Maps, Yandex Maps
197
D
People’s
ATLAS
Garage
Idea of building “People’s garages” appeared in City Hall in 2003 to combat the numerous “rakushkas”, fooded Moscow neighborhood. The program was launched in 2009. The idea of the program — to build parking garages and sell them to residents at prime cost. Spaces in “people’s garages”, planned to be sold at a fxed price of 350 thousand rubles which is signifcantly lower than the market cost. This was allowed by special order of granting land plots for garages. However , Moscovites did not show “People’s Garage “ any interest. In December 2010, Moscow authorities acknowledged that the program has failed . Reason for the failure: bureaucratic delays, the high price, bad location out of walking distance from the areas of residential neighborhoods.
198
D
ATLAS
Police Control Map Each crossing of a radial road with the MKAD in Moscow is under police control. â&#x2014;? â&#x2014;?
Source: Wikimapia and Google Maps, 2014
Permanent road police Temporary road police posts
199
D
ATLAS
Pedestrian
Crossings
Underpasses are mainly attached to the main radial roads and Garden Ring, overpasses are generally located on MKAD and Third Road Ring, the space in between is covered with zebras
● ● ●
Pedestrian overpass Pedestrian underpass Pedestrian zebra crossing
200
Source: OSM Maps, Wikimapia Categories, 2014
D
ATLAS
Garages with Boxes 2014
Individual
Main trend: The less valuable territory â&#x20AC;&#x201D; the more garages. Large garage patches are stretched along roads and rail-roads. Small garage patches are located in close proximity to houses. ~ 520,000 garage boxes
Source: wikimapia.org
201
D
ATLAS
Monasteries Outposts
As Defense
In the XII century, the time of Moscowâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s gain of power, its defense system got improved. From the very center, the Kremlin, roads have been built to monasteries, located around the city.
202
Image: Moscow and surrounding monasteries, 1300s
D
ATLAS
Density of
Crossings by Districts
Lack of the elements of pedestrian infrastructure is especially represented in the periphery of the city
Number of pedestrians crossings per district
35 Source: OSM Maps, Wikimapia Categories, 2014
60
95
145
245
203
D
ATLAS
Car-related
Services
All car-related services, distributed over Moscow.
204
Source: Wikimapia and Google Maps (2014)
D
ATLAS
Petrol Stations Logo On this map, the petrol stations are represented by their logo.
Source: Wikimapia and Google Maps, 2014
205
D
ATLAS
Car Dealers
Logo
On this map, the car dealers are represented by their logo.
206
Source: Wikimapia and Google Maps, 2014
D
ATLAS
Megastores
Logo
On this map, the Megastores are represented by their logo.
Source: Wikimapia and Google Maps, 2014
207
Detour
208
Imprint
Education programme 2013/14: Urban Routines/Car
Directors Theo Deutinger, Sergey Chernov Researchers Vitaliy Avdyeyev, Alexander Ayoupov, Irina Eremenko, Olena Grankina, Roel van Herpt, Giulio Margheri, Sabina Maslova, Elena Mazina, James Schrader Editing & Design Lukas Feireiss, Floyd E. Schulze
209
And if I only could Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d make a deal with god and Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d get him to swap our places be running up that road be running up that hill be running up that building if I only could Kate Bush, Running Up That Hill ( A Deal With God), 1985
210