Andrey GNEZDILOV
Deputy Director, Chief Project Architect of Ostozhenka Architectural Bureau
And its components – street, lane, square, public garden, park
All citizens dream of private space and hope that high-quality public spaces will be also created. This combination of fundamentally different space categories forms the city. Therefore, we need to design new neighborhoods. How does our bureau, whose project was a finalist in the architectural planning competition to develop a site renovation concept for Moscow, propose to do this.
The pilot site has an area of about 125 ha. Prospekt Vernadskogo Metro station is located at the intersection of Vernadsky Avenue and Udaltsov Street, and in future it will be a transfer point to a station of the Third Interchange Contour of the Metro, forming the core of the TIH. To the south is Lobachevsky Street, the future South-West Expressway, and across the street is the Moscow State Institute of International Relations.
The concept integrates two parts of the district separated by Vernadsky Avenue. To do this, additional crossings are created and the mode of operation of traffic lights is changed. For the same consolidation objective, the existing street network will be improved and a clear traffic net will be created. The whole district is divided into business, commercial and recreational areas.
In addition to architectural planning, the renovation concept for the Vernadsky Avenue area provides an economic model for the project, developed by the Institute of Urban Economics. This allowed us to choose not only the best planning solutions, but also to ensure an economically justifiable the project, and therefore reduce the risks for both market and budget renovation investments.
Thus, implementing our concept will almost double the area’s capitalization from 173 to 309 billion rubles, while the average density of housing will increase by only 1.7 times. The new dense road network will create space for various commercial and public services, including small businesses, with a market potential of about 7 billion rubles a year for the area. An increase in the number of resident the capitalization of the area and the activation of business processes will triple the city’s net revenue to 1 billion rubles annually (excluding the cost of maintaining new infrastructure and improvement amounting to about 0.4 billion rubles annually).
Finally, we did not ignore housing innovations, which are so important for a modern large city. The concept include the creation of the first rental housing bases on best practices of large foreign cities. We think that the area of Vernadsky Avenue is the best one for testing the new housing format, because it is a center of attraction for universities and student life.