The area of the city has doubled in 2012 with the stroke of a pen more than as the Russian capital were hit rural suburbs. Forests had to make way for construction sites. How is it there today?
Alexey Zakharinsky shares his modest wooden house with ten cats. He lives in Moscow, a small town, which was incorporated as a district of Moscow. It is not long, because the 51-Year-old and his neighbors lived on the edge of a forest. The capital seemed to be far away.
Within a few years, the city has moved up on his doorstep. The surrounding forests are disappearing rapidly. A once densely covered valley was used as a storage facility for the earth, which was the construction of a new metro line is being excavated.
Everything began in 2012, when the Kremlin decided to enlarge the area of the Russian capital. To the southwest of the metropolis was a rural area, half the size of Luxembourg, in the city territory of Moscow city. Thus, Moscow became twice as large.
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“The new Moscow” has been stamped as a housing for a rapidly growing population out of the ground. This should reduce the pressure on the old parts of the city. But villagers like Zakharinsky were shocked. None of them had asked.
“At the beginning it a nightmare, as you have cut part of me out,” says Zakharinsky in an interview with DW. “I was naturally assume that all of this (Land) is our property. Everyone who lived here, was able to gather without permission to go to ask in the forest for mushrooms or just to walk.”
Outside the village of Rumyantsevo one of the many newly built high-rise buildings in New Moscow
Zakharinsky, as the fungal and plant connoisseur, a name, knows what is at stake. “Here, many rare plants grow,” he says in a DW interview. “Wild garlic, wood anemone and even the swamp-Pippau (Anm. the. Red.: Crepis Paludosa). Here it was demonstrated for the first Time, that the swamp-Pippau grows also in the Moscow Region. This is an additional Argument in order to obtain at least a part of the Moscow forest landscape.”
The ideal city?
The then Russian President Dmitry Medvedev saw in 2012, the expansion plans as the ideal opportunity to stomp a model city from the ground. According to this Plan, mainly low-rise buildings should shape the future of the residential areas – one for Moscow, atypical architecture.
In addition to Innovation and education, specialized centers should be created in order to create new jobs. Government institutions should move to a new location outside of the great ring road – the border of the old city.
These centres should be in no case so as a colorless commuter towns, of which we already have too many in Moscow and around the country, he said at the presentation of the plans.
Rare plants such as the swamp-Pippau grow in the forests of New Moscow
Almost seven years later, the dreams of Medvedev’s have not realized. The new parts of the city are full of the traditional, large residential blocks of concrete, which he had criticized at the time.
And also the government institutions remained to a large extent because of where they were before. The mayor of Moscow, Sergei Sobyanin criticized the plans to decentralize the municipal administration to the public. Sobyanin says that it is for the majority of Muscovites make more sense if all of the Service remained of the facilities within the old city limits.
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Critics condemn the fact that there had been no public discussion about these plans. Instead, it would be valuable green spaces furious quickly replaced neighbourhoods through new housing, while the development of a necessary infrastructure for access to the city centre will be neglected.
The urban researcher Aleksei Novikov language, 2015, during one of the rare public debates about the advantages and disadvantages of the project from a “big mistake”.
There was not then, as the construction sites would be less. According to estimates by the city administration could draw up to the year 2035 to the 1.5 million additional residents in the new parts of the city. In fact, it could be significantly more, as more and more Russians it draws from the less prosperous areas of the country to the capital. And the prices for homes are in the “New Moscow” much more attractive than in the overpopulated, the old part of the city.
The Changes have changed not only the environment, but also to live together.
New Moscow to relax the tense traffic situation in the overpopulated old parts of the city, says the Kremlin
Houses used to be goat, today
In the village of Pykhtino, a few kilometers North of Moscow, along the rumbling of a Bulldozer on the main road. A low-flying passenger plane crosses the sky on the way to just under two kilometers from the airport Vnukovo. In short, the airplane noise drowns out the background noise of the nearby highway, the traffic is increasing steadily.
“It is not a long time, since goats and chickens walked around freely here. We had enough space to hold the animals,” says Ilya Sorokin, compared to the DW. He points in the direction of the new 20-storey building, which stands just behind the former village boundary. “But now there is no open access Land.”
The 33-year-old Sorokin has spent most of his life here. He remembers that Pykthino was once a small village, and that the people held here.
“Our community is consisted of 14 villages, with 3,000 inhabitants,” said Sorokin. Since 2012 has increased the population to almost 70,000 people.
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Although Sorokin and the others here know that your village is so as it disappeared once knew is forever, don’t give up. You have reached, that the city authority can be a Playground build. Also, you have made the city to the pollution of the nearby Likova river carefully. It is believed that the airport Vnukovo, as well as one of the new residential area is the pollution responsible.
Chickens and other small animals had to be high, soft houses,says Ilya Sorokin
Zakharinsky believes that he can win the fight for nature conservation. His idyllic village life, he no longer gets back. Nevertheless, more and more residents are expressing criticism of the speed of the urban expansion rate. And they ensure that their voices are heard. Some local activists ran for office in municipal elections by 2018, some of them had success. Now try to take more influence on the future of their communities.
Zakharinsky has taken a different path, to influence the course of things. With guided walks and photo exhibitions, he tried to make on the remaining natural Moskowskis attention.
“I have ceased to grieve me very much,” he says. “I don’t know that I am very young. And if You stop don’t have the means it, then You have to adjust kind of the new circumstances.”
After all, his district has now improved local amenities such as shops and other services. This is very practical, he says. “And yet,” sighs Zakharinsky, “with the rest, it is a thing of the past.”
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