The Eastern Frontier

In 2020, the Genplan Institute of Moscow came up with a master plan for developing the city of Kazan up until 2040. The republic’s capital opted for the path of polycentric development: along with the consolidation of a compact city, there is also the task of developing its peripheral areas, where there is still a lot of vacant land, not burdened by any restrictions. Until recently, this process went on, if not spontaneously, then quite freely for sure: for example, on the western outskirts of the city, on the side of the suburban town of Zelenodolsk, dense residential complexes, from 17 to 25 floors high, are shooting up into the sky, often with transport infrastructure lagging behind, and with a minimal social load in the form of standard schools and kindergartens. The housing complexes “Salavat Kupere”, “Zalesny City”, and others, are “blood brothers” of similar complexes of Saint Petersburg, seeing that the current population of Kazan is 1.3 million people.

On the east side, there are also undeveloped hectares of former agricultural land, the so-called “eastern arc”. It became part of the city after the approval of the 2007 master plan, after which Kazan in this part acquired the structure of a “puff pie”: dense historical buildings gradually merge with Soviet city blocks, which are then replaced by a belt of modern quarters, followed by a “lush” layer of townhouses and, finally, there is the “eastern arc”, which is destined to become the “crust” of the latest architecture.

Maxim Vikulin, the head of architectural and planning office

The concept of integrated development of the “Eastern Arc” is one of the largest regional projects of the Institute in terms of both the scale of the territory and the detail of design solutions. This project is part of a continuous cycle of systematic and consistent work of the Institute with Kazan since 2014 – from the preparation of the master plan and developing land use and development rules to the development of documentation on the planning of the territory. This practice of complex interaction with the territory “from general to specific” allows the Institute to increase its competence in the region and act as one of the key urban planning experts evaluating and determining the directions of spatial development of the city.

Vitaly Lutz, the head of perspective project depeartment

One of the key ideas of our concept is the creation of a “necklace” of mini-cities that have not only functional saturation and specialization, but also spatial and environmental fullness. Each such mini-city has its own “main” place and a sufficient variety of public spaces: squares, boulevards, shopping streets, and so on. This approach is close to the one we tried to implement in the settlement of Voronovskoye.