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Sunday, 30.09.2007
Moscow’s growth is causing headaches for planners
Moscow. The Russian capital is growing at breath-taking speed. Traffic jams, noise and smog are just a few of the negative side effects. Russia-Now’s André Ballin spoke with architect Niko Rickert about Moscow’s painful metamorphosis.
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R-N: How has Moscow changed in recent years?
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Rickert: Neither the city’s infrastructure, housing, traffic planning or park and recreational areas can currently meet the demands placed on them. The city’s General Plan up to 2020 has already been rendered obsolete. This is because Moscow simply dominates the country economically, something that urban planners did not foresee.
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R-N: How severe is the shortage of housing in the city?
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Rickert: The city has housing capacity for nine million inhabitants, but rumour has it that there are in fact fifteen million inhabitants. So you can calculate the extent of the shortage. In addition, it is almost impossible to provide any more housing within the MKAD ringroad, even allowing for increasing density through higher building. Because increasing density causes immense infrastructural problems.
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Another aspect of the housing problem is the fact that apartments and houses have become objects of speculation, meaning that speculative vacancies exacerbate the housing shortage.
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R-N: They remain vacant in order to push up prices further?
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Rickert: It makes sense to buy apartments as investment and it does not then matter much whether they are occupied or not. Of course, this is not true of the majority of apartments, but there is still no equilibrium between demand for housing and occupation rates of existing housing.
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R-N: What urban planning problems result from such explosive growth?
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Niko Rickert Niko Rickert is head of the +aap architectural bureau. Contakt: rickert@a-ap.ru
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Rickert: I can say it in numbers: There are 3.3 million cars registered in Moscow, but only 1.6 million parking spaces. That’s obviously a major problem. Every year sees 200,000 extra cars hit Moscow’s streets, 800,000 cars are on the street at any one time. Moscow has 1,300km of streets, 40% less than the required road network compared to other major European cities. Moscow’s spider-web street grid has not been upgraded, purely because the city planners could not anticipate such explosive urban growth.
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R-N: What is being undertaken to make Moscow more hospitable?
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Rickert: There are some measures included in the General Plan: Increasing the street grid, relocating jobs out of the city centre, building satellite towns outside the MKAD ringroad that are equipped with all necessary social and cultural infrastructure to avoid becoming dormitory towns. This will be vastly expensive, but it is the only way to tackle the situation.
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Al other developments are more problematic: for instance, proposals to create industrial centres along the third and fourth ring roads will simply create new unsustainable housing densities.
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R-N: Why is it so desirable to live in the centre in Moscow? Everyone wants to live and work downtown
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Rickert: That has economic reasons. Money flows to Moscow from the whole country and apartments in the centre count as an investment. In addition, the arrival of foreign companies on the Russian market has also made demands on downtown. There are more and more offices downtown, and fewer apartments.
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There is a move away from Moscow, but the surrounding region’s infrastructure is still not developed enough to offer a real alternative. The road network is underdeveloped and there are insufficient work, shopping and leisure options to make it possible to do without travelling to the centre of Moscow. That’s why the roads are already snarled at 8 in the morning. The air is better, but it doesn’t compensate for infrastructural weakness.
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R-N: How long is the construction boom going to last?
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Rickert: There’s still room to build, especially in industrial areas, which are being packed full of offices. It’ll take ten years before it’s saturated, depending on political and economic factors. Loans are being dished out very generously and it is by no means certain that Russian borrowers are to be trusted: The bubble could burst.
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R-N: How speculative are prices in Moscow?
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Rickert: They are the highest in the world, and quality simply does not match cost. There is a clear quality gap to Western countries. Then there is the most serious problem: traffic, costing billions each year in delays. On the other hand, there is a huge demand for high quality apartments, which will continue as long as most of what on offer was built in Soviet times. The state is only slowly retreating from the housing sector. When it does, modernisation will accelerate.
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R-N: Thank you for the interview!
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The interview was conducted by André Ballin.
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