Moscow Urban Forum 2015: Housing Policy, Internet Services, and Dreams of a New Moscow
Московский урбанистический форум-2014
On October 16-17, the annual Moscow Urban Forum will take place in the Moscow Manege. For the first time ever, this year's event is being organised by the HSE Graduate School of Urban Studies and Planning, which proposed a new format for the event.
Forum Objectives
The Moscow Urban Forum has taken place for five years in a row. The forum was created as a platform to facilitate communication between the government, businesses, and the expert community on key issues concerning urban development. But the forum changed this year and has been split up into two parts. The upcoming October forum will focus on cases and problems in Moscow, while the forum set to take place in July 2016 will take on a global, regional, and Moscow-focused agenda.
Format
This is the first year that the HSE Graduate School of Urban Studies and Planning has managed the event. The School has come up with the main topics of discussion, as well as a list of experts to speak at the event. The main goal of the forum will be to go in depth on the types of problems typical of Moscow, as well as promote communication and bring in representatives from a wide variety of expert and research organisations.
The first day of the event will be focused on business, while the second day will be celebratory in nature and open to the general public.
At a plenary session on October 16, participants can expect to see speeches by Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin, representatives of the federal government, as well as foreign delegations, including the Lord Mayor of Leipzig, the Vice Mayor of Milan, and the former Chief Architect of Barcelona.
Key Topics of Interest
One of the sessions will be devoted to the development of a polycentric city model. Other topics of discussion include development prospects for the Moscow River, the Moscow Little Ring Railway, transport hubs, and peripheral regions as a whole. In the future, the Moscow River and the Little Ring Railway might become a new spatial framework for the city that will serve as the centre of development for new activities and regions that are not very popular today, according to the HSE Graduate School of Urban Studies and Planning. This discussion is expected to continue at the July forum, and comprehensive research might be done on the matter.
Moscow housing policy will be the other session's leitmotif. This topic is close to nearly everyone’s heart at the forum. A separate session will be devoted to internet services and the development of electronic methods of interacting with residents. ‘This is an area in which the Moscow government has achieve huge success over the last several years,’ says Vera Leonova of the Graduate School of Urban Studies and Planning. ‘In this regard, Moscow started completely from scratch and has reached a level comparable to some of the world’s leading metropolises. You have to understand that a city is not only a physical, offline space. It’s also a new online space that will continue to flourish. Residents constantly “relocate” between the online and offline city, and a virtual atmosphere is being formed by the way people live in the real city. This is what has already begun changing usual social, economic, and communicative practices,’ she adds.
Plans for the Festival
The forum will be open to the general public on October 17. Guests are invited to take part in master classes, listen to speeches by prominent urban activists, and attend various concerts planned for the event. The Graduate School of Urban Studies and Planning is also the organiser of the educational programme at the festival. This will include lectures, presentations, and round tables.
Lecturers include Vicente Guallart, who is the former Chief Architect of Barcelona and the founder of the Institute of Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC); CUNY Professor Lev Manovich; Architectural Association School of Architecture (London) Professor Lawrence Barth; and more.
Grigory Revzin
See also:
Researchers at HSE University Identify the Most Walkable Areas in Moscow
Experts at HSE University and Lomonosov Moscow State University examined the available data on Moscow's walkability and found the central and south-western parts of the city to be more walkable than others. However, the eastern and south-eastern areas are in need of improvements to make them more pedestrian-friendly. The study has been published in Cities.
HSE University Urban Planners Take Part in Global Mayors’ Forum in Guangzhou, China
A team from HSE University's Faculty of Urban and Regional Development took part in the Global Mayor’s Forum—a global event in urban development. Held in December 2023 in Guangzhou (PRC), the largest congress of urban planners brought together more than 800 guests from 65 cities and 37 countries, as well as nine international organisations.
Card File: Travel Diary
Optimising a city's transportation system requires insights into the dynamics of urban traffic to understand where, how, when, and to what extent people travel within the city. The rationale behind route selection and the choice of transportation mode are also of importance. The primary source of this data is the travel diary, a tool designed to survey people's transport behaviour. Based on a paper by Maria Sergienko, a master's student of the HSE Faculty of Urban and Regional Development, IQ.HSE examines how people's daily travel can be described in detail and why an automated diary cannot yet completely replace its manual counterpart.
‘Seeing Moscow Ranked First among the Cities of BRICS Countries Is Pleasant, but Not Surprising’
An international consortium of research organisations from China, India, and Russia, including HSE University’s Faculty of Urban and Regional Development represented by experts from the Vysokovsky Graduate School of Urban Studies and Planning and the Centre for Social Research and Technological Innovation (CITY), is developing an index of technological and spatial urban development (the Urban & Innovation Environment Index). Recently, a list of the top 10 largest cities of the BRICS countries was published on the project’s website. The Russian capital took the first place in the ranking, followed by Beijing, Shanghai, Sao Paulo, and Guangzhou.
Summer University 2023: ‘A Good Introduction to Urban Studies’
At the start of August, HSE University held the tenth annual Summer University. This year’s programme took the form of a workshop on urban studies. The participants attended four courses from HSE University faculty and invited experts and worked on their own projects to develop a cultural heritage site. Jung Woo Lee, from South Korea, shares his impressions of the Summer University.
‘The Virtual City Is Joining the Real One at the Forefront’
HSE University has launched enrolment in a new online Master’s programme in Digital Urban Analytics. In this interview, the programme’s Academic Supervisor Ekaterina Zarudnaya and its Scientific Supervisor Kirill Puzanov speak about the processes and tasks generated by the online city, the demand for urban analysts, and the specifics of studying in the programme.
A City in Your Mind: HSE Urbanists on Perceptions of Place and Imagined Neighbourhoods
Associate Professor Kirill Puzanov of the HSE Vysokovsky Graduate School of Urbanism and HSE University Professor Oleg Baevskiy have held lectures at the Red Square Book festival. They talked about perceptions of the city, its private and public aspects, chamber and representative spaces, and imaginary (or ‘vernacular’) areas. The open lectures took place as part of the HSE University Open to the City project.
Two Worlds of Residents: Car Owners Look at Shared Urban Courtyards Differently from Pedestrians
Researchers from HSE University and St. Petersburg State University of Architecture and Civil Engineering (SPSUACE) used eye tracking to study how residents who own cars and those who don’t look at the shared courtyards of multistorey apartment buildings. The study was published in Urban Forestry & Urban Greening.
Back to the Future: Is Manufacturing Returning to Cities?
Are cities set to become industrial centres again? Are migrants integrating in Russia? How are city dwellers taking advantage of micro-mobility? Experts from the HSE Faculty of Urban and Regional Development (FURD) took part in Moscow Urban Forum. This year the topic of the Forum was ‘Superstar Cities: Transforming for Success’.
‘It Takes a Team to Develop a City’
What is urban planning? What is the ‘stranger effect’ and why do we need a multidisciplinary approach in education? School Head and Associate Professor Kirill Puzanov spoke with the News Service about what students learn and how in the Vysokovsky Graduate School of Urbanism, which celebrates its 10th anniversary this year.