The increase of the urban population is the main trend of the 2007st century, and the qualitative transition took place relatively recently: in 2050, the number of urban residents exceeded the number of people living in villages for the first time in human history. According to the report of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, the urban population will double by 70, and about XNUMX% of the world's inhabitants will live in cities. Processes that previously developed over decades will become rapid, that is, our cities will change before our eyes, exponentially. They will increase in size and become denser.
Conditional model of the future city. The UN Pavilion at the UN Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development Habitat III in the capital of Ecuador, Quito, 2016. Photo: Habitat III on Flickr
Already by 2030, the area of urban-type settlements will reach 1,2 million square kilometers, which is three times higher than the figures at the beginning of the century. Let's take this forecast as a postulate and start from it. After all, it is from him that advanced countries and world cities are pushed in their planning — short-term and long-term.
Dozens of lectures, conferences, master classes, and meetups are held every week in Kyiv, the topic of which is urban planning, architecture, and design. There is a heated debate about what is good and what is bad about the Kyiv Development Strategy 2025, why the General Plan 2025 has not yet been adopted, what is considered the framework of the city, and what exactly is the mission of the capital?
Foreign urban planners willingly come to us and share their experience. At events organized by the educational platform CANactions, speakers often speak in English — and the lack of an interpreter does not affect the number of listeners and the level of discussion. And it seems that there are practically no mental barriers left between Ukraine and the world, at least the circulation of ideas is absolutely barrier-free.
Ukrainian cities are gradually building their own operating system
In an effort to integrate into the global mainstream, Ukrainian cities are gradually building their own operating system — and it is not only about technologies based on Big Data, but also about the development of standards and city codes. So, "Agents of Change" are developing navigation for Kyiv, and literally on the eve of the new year in Dnipro, at a session of the city council, they approved a unified design code for placing signs on building facades and street advertising. And there are dozens of such examples.
The highest activity is manifested in tactical urbanism. Indeed, the techniques of point acupuncture (about which the urbanist Fulko Treffers spoke in detail), informal urbanism (about which Anastasiya Ponomaryova, co-founder of Urban Curators spoke), and the construction of a Selfmade city (an article about Buxlotterham in Amsterdam) are interesting and allow everyone to realize their skills in playing Minecraft in the practical field and being a real sustainist (about what this means - in an interview with the Dutch sociologist Michil Schwartz). But it would be fair to consider these trends visible to everyone as the tip of the iceberg. And what is under the water?
«Everyone says that we are together. Everyone says, but few know how»
The development of cities cannot be considered and planned as an abstract model in a vacuum - this is one of the main theses on which the mentors and experts of GIZ - the German development agency Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit GmbH - base their activities. GIZ is one of the most active providers promoting the concept of EU sustainable development in Ukraine and an integrated approach to planning.
With the support of GIZ, six Ukrainian cities (Vinnytsia, Zhytomyr, Chernivtsi, Poltava, Lviv and Kyiv) are developing a program of tactical and strategic actions within the framework of the project "Integrated development of cities of Ukraine" at the expense of international donors.
The architecture of Sofia Square reflected on the facade of the Hyatt Hotel. Photo: Andriy Vyetoshkin
GIZ finances training and participation in international scientific and educational conferences of Ukrainian officials working in the field of architecture and urban planning, supports specific initiatives to preserve historical heritage. For example, the restoration of doors and windows in old Lviv houses in 2017 was supported by GIZ. In short, GIZ keeps the window of opportunity wide open for everyone who cares about the fate of cities.
At the same time, GIZ tries to be as honest as possible. In the methodological materials of the agency, you can find the brochure "Ukraine through the eyes of Germany", compiled on the basis of the opinions of experts and young development specialists from Germany. In particular, the interviewers were asked to describe a positive image of the future of Ukraine. The majority of experts emphasized that in the case of Ukraine, a high degree of uncertainty must be taken into account — to translate it from diplomatic language, it is obvious to Europeans that our country is in the state of a tightrope walker, balancing. One of the quotes: "If you look closely at Ukraine, you can immediately see how weak the country's infrastructure is and how outdated most of the enterprises are."
If we do not understand what problems the city has, then we will not understand what solutions are needed for them
Jane Jacobs
Following the advice of the founder of modern urbanism, Jane Jacobs, who noted the axiom "if we do not understand what problems the city has, we will not understand what solutions are needed for them", the Ukrainian Institute for the Future together with the Interprojekt company published an analytical expert report "Cities 2030. Modernize or die".
The publication differs from academic publications, concepts, strategies and field reports in that it is, in fact, a mix of statistical data, opinions and theses of both formal and informal urban planners, scientists, representatives of self-government and executive power, which are based on their own experience and Ukrainian realities. Experts speak candidly about risks, challenges and global issues such as aging infrastructure and the demographic crisis. The report, the work on which took about six months, is not comprehensive and does not cover all relevant topics. The organizers plan to publish at least two more such collections — there are enough hot topics. Studying and mastering the real situation will be a reliable point of support.
Hryhoriy Melnychuk is the coordinator of the public organization "City Development Platform". Hipster urbanism or imitation of development
The very name "Cities 2018. Modernize or die out." Hryhoriy Melnychuk, one of the authors of the idea of compiling the report, the coordinator of the public organization "City Development Platform", does not consider such wording to be an exaggeration.
PRAGMATIKA.MEDIA: "Modernize or die out" - doesn't this imperative sound too categorical?
Hryhoriy Melnychuk: For a number of settlements, this is not hyperbole. We are faced with cases where, for example, a whole generation has left or is planning to leave the city. In one of the regional centers, a survey of young people was conducted, and about 70% said that they would like to leave the city. Moreover, it is a regional center, and not the smallest in Ukraine.
R.M.: In one of your articles, you talk about the cargo cult of "hipster urbanism", which stands in for a real, rather unattractive problem. What exactly do you mean?
H. M.: There are urban problems, the solution of which does not seem as bright and beautiful as, for example, a new bench or a street with a bicycle path that leads from nowhere to nowhere. But these problems can actually be more important. Many such more important examples can be cited: the organization of some public spaces with very inexpensive repairs or replenishment of the public transport fleet, albeit not with new ones, but with a sufficient number of trolleybuses, trams or buses.
The transport problem is one of the most painful for the quality of life. It often happens like in Kyiv: the city buys and buys new trolleybuses, the mayor and officials report about it in their speeches, but for some reason they no longer appear on the routes. For example, now there are less than 400 trolleybuses in Kyiv, while in 1989 there were more than a thousand of them. The situation is the same in regional centers. The city can buy new vehicles, but at the same time write off the same number of old cars, because there are no funds for good maintenance and repairs
And we face similar situations in various spheres. New parks are created and inaugurated, but there are no sidewalks in the residential area. From the point of view of PR, the sidewalk is an ungrateful object. You cannot open it by cutting the tape. And in small settlements, mayors really like to open something with fanfare. For example, a bus stop to which a broken road leads. At the same time, such discoveries are presented as global reforms, achievements in the field of urbanism and a great victory. In fact, benches and squares will not stop the outflow of young people from depressed cities.
R.M.: It seems that Kyiv is not in danger of extinction, rather, there are other problems here - overpopulation and merciless development on the periphery. As a result, there are permanent conflicts between residents, developers and the authorities. Can such an expansion of the capital be considered a healthy process?
H. M.: Currently, there are no prerequisites for Kyiv to expand administratively, moreover, it is unlikely to happen in the next ten years, even when it comes to some nearby suburbs.
The reason is mercantile: the authorities of these settlements will by no means agree to flow into the city, as they will lose their influence on the distribution of land for development. Until everything is divided there, there will be no annexation to Kyiv. De facto — yes, the borders are closing, and it may be about the creation of some kind of agglomeration, but not on the basis of an administrative-command system, when the mayor of Kyiv decides everything, but rather on the basis of a system of coordination councils with great autonomy of small participants of the agglomeration. Greater Paris or Seattle works according to this principle.
Northern Bridge, Kyiv. Photo: Andriy Vyetoshkin
Under such a competent organization, the local government would voluntarily transfer part of its powers to the center of the metropolis — it could be the organization of traffic or large infrastructure projects, for example, a high-speed tram to Sofiivska Borshchagivka or issues of water supply or sewage. And what kind of improvement there will be and how many schools will be built is a question of local self-government, and it is quite normal that conflicts arise.
This suggests that society is capable of resisting and demanding compromises. Moreover, it would be interesting to decentralize the Kyiv suburbs — that is, to get conditional mayors of Troyeschyna, the mayor of Borshchagivka, and the mayor of Oboloni who would deal with local issues.
But the RDA — a parallel structure subordinated directly to the president, which has neither a budget nor representative power — in my opinion, can be simply liquidated and forgotten like a nightmare. And what improvement there will be and how many schools will be built is a matter of local self-government, and, on the contrary, it is interesting when it is solved differently in different districts, a healthy competition of solutions results, the districts are not similar to each other.
A city that does not teach people
Stanislav Dyomin is an architect, the head of the KP "Kyiv Center for the Development of the Urban Environment", six months ago he headed the KP "Kyiv Center for the Development of the Urban Environment". He believes that the aesthetics of the space determines the behavior and aesthetics of a person, admitting that Kyiv today looks like a poorly tailored and unfashionable suit. In an article for "Cities 2030. Modernize or die out", he compares the qualities of modern urban spaces in Ukraine and abroad, and speaking at the Green Cities conference, Dyomin talked about what, in his opinion, is sorely lacking in Kyiv today and what hinders the new a generation of urban planning officials to quickly solve problems. At least at the level of arrangement.
Stanislav Dyomin: The space of Kyiv is in many ways incomprehensible, it is used irrationally, there are many difficulties with its maintenance, some spaces are not defined functionally or are not used for their intended purpose. What do we strive for: rational use of urban space, where conditions allow a person to develop and grow, or do they, on the contrary, make him unhappy and prevent him from realizing himself?
Faced with issues of management, processes of transformation of urban space, I discovered a whole layer of problems that I had not encountered so closely as an architect. Starting with the regulatory framework. The regulatory framework that regulates the improvement of urban space is outdated and in need of development. There is no design stage, which allows for comprehensive design of the street. There is a stage of urban planning documentation - general plan, zoning, DPT, which is immediately followed by an architectural stage, where the architect is directly engaged in the design of specific objects. In this scheme, there is no place for designing the general appearance of the street. As a result, the street is divided into fragments: a separate house, separate landscaping, a separate road, etc.
The development process can be healthy without clear stimulation, without determining the direction
Back in 2014, there were attempts to certify streets and squares in Kyiv, but they were unsuccessful. And today, the stage of street design in general, with facades, pedestrian zone, roadway, does not exist. In addition, all these fragments are spread over different balance holders, that is, there is no comprehensive management. The rules for the maintenance of urban spaces, the "Rules of Improvement" are morally and terminologically obsolete and are not suitable for the maintenance of those infrastructure objects that society needs now.
These rules, like carpet bombing, cover everything and immediately, for example, they put designer benches in the park, and in six months the utility workers came and painted everything green, because their task is to paint, and they only have green paint, so they bought it... It is necessary to introduce local rules for the maintenance of landscaping objects, which will be based on the project, and the maintenance process will consist in bringing it to the project state.
Architecture of Kyiv. Photo: Andriy Vyetoshkin
There is no comprehensive strategy. This leads to the fact that the projects implemented by city departments and enterprises are not synchronized in timing, sequence, and placement. This process is manually regulated. And there is constant confusion between managers: the principle on the basis of which the customer enterprise is determined has not been formulated. Another huge problem I see is that the city does not teach people to be citizens. In Kyiv, there are no programs that would explain how to use spaces. For example, in Paris, I was stopped right at the train station and handed a pamphlet that teaches the rules of behavior in the city.
The development process cannot be healthy without clear stimulation, without defining the direction that the city should be, what we want, what results we want to get, what we can demand, what we can participate in as citizens.
The only vector of development
Joan Clos is the Executive Director of the UN Program on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development. There is no one-size-fits-all recipe for improving urbanization and achieving sustainable urban development, but the New Urban Development Program contains principles and methods tested in practice
Most modern European urban planners, as well as the strategies they develop today, refer to the "New Urban Development Agenda", which was adopted at the UN Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development (Habitat III) in the capital of Ecuador, Quito, on October 20, 2016.
Habitat conferences take place once every 20 years, during which UN member countries try to implement the main tenets of the declaration into life. The "New Urban Development Program" has been translated into six languages (and recently into Ukrainian), audio versions and Braille translations have been released.
"There is no one-size-fits-all recipe for improving urbanization and achieving sustainable urban development, but the New Urban Development Agenda contains principles and methods tested in practice," said Joan Clos, Executive Director of the UN Program on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development, in the foreword.
The new paradigm is a desperate attempt to reconcile modernist values with tradition and cultural diversity
Habitat III participants formed a rather controversial image of the cities of the future — the density of buildings will increase, and the majority of motorists will have to switch to public transport.
Suburban sprawl like "single-story America" is uneconomical, inefficient, and expensive. Since cities are created by people to communicate with each other, the denser the urban fabric, the easier it is to communicate, cooperate, and communicate.
At the same time, the development of public spaces to the detriment of private spaces is inevitable, and there is an obvious need to resolve thousands of everyday conflicts that arise when personal boundaries are violated. The townspeople will have to build a life in post-privacy conditions.
The interests and rights of pedestrians are marked as priorities in the program (special attention is paid to ensuring a "safe and healthy environment on the way to school for every child"), preservation of ecosystems, development of culture and protection of architectural and cultural heritage, transparency and accessibility, countering gentrification - displacement of the poor strata of the population, support for polycentric political measures and plans.
At the UN Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development Habitat III in the capital of Ecuador, Quito, 2016.
The authors of the "New Urban Development Agenda" declare the global goal of equal access to resources and prosperity for all, with the eradication of poverty and discrimination in all forms and manifestations. Overall, the new paradigm appears to be a desperate attempt to reconcile modernist values with tradition and cultural diversity. But it is worth becoming a reference point, and is taken as a basis.
In order to follow the course defined by Habitat III in practice, a certain amount of courage is required in Ukrainian realities. So, as soon as the developer submits for approval a project that provokes further social stratification, for example, a closed quarter behind a high fence, it can be called that project that contradicts the principles of openness, transparency, accessibility and theses that call for social mixing and interaction. Ivory towers were clearly outside the new paradigm.
Conditional model of the city of the future. The UN Pavilion at the UN Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development Habitat III in the capital of Ecuador, Quito, 2016. Photo: Habitat III on Flickr
When it comes to high-rise construction to the detriment of green areas, one can immediately appeal to several articles of the "New Urban Development Program", which call for protecting fragile ecosystems from the destructive effects of urban development.
Perhaps because such goals sound utopian, the Habitat III declaration is so rarely cited by politicians and urban planning officials. However, this is a strategic vision for the next two decades, which is marked by taking into account the opinions of hundreds of thousands of people from most countries of the world.
200 experts worked on the final resolution for half a year. And although the recommendations and strategic goals specified in the declaration are not mandatory for implementation by UN member countries, to completely ignore them means to accept the role of an outsider, to remain on the sidelines of civilization.
The city is the source and solution of problems
In images of the Earth's night surface, taken by the Finnish scientific satellite NPP in 2012 for NASA, the territory of Europe has the appearance of a uniformly illuminated canvas.
The territory of Ukraine is mostly a dark space with bright islands of the capital, large cities and agglomerations in the east, only in some cases connected by a chain of lighting along the roads. This is a clear illustration of the level of urbanization. Actually, it is the pictures from space that are the basis for scientific research and planning.
Poshtova Square, Kyiv. Photo: Andriy Vyetoshkin
Scientists distinguish two models of urbanization — the resettlement of the rural population to cities, which strengthens their monocentricity, and the development of infrastructure and quality of life in small and rural settlements to the urban level. Ukraine is developing steadily according to the first model. In addition, as Olena Dronova, associate professor of the Department of Economic and Social Geography of Taras Shevchenko Kyiv University, writes in an article for the report "Cities 2030. Modernize or Die Out", Ukraine is one of the countries with the highest degree of depopulation - a decrease in the quality of the population. And in the XXI century. depopulation covered all regions, with the exception of the capital.
Politicians often defend the version that the cause of all urgent problems of Ukraine lies in the last century, when the forced change of the economic system during the Soviet era disrupted the natural process of the formation of cities. Therefore, they say, revolutionary reforms should be avoided in order to return to the evolutionary model. And since for an official and a politician of the old formation, any reform is already a shaking of the foundations, the implication of such statements is simple: do nothing.
Ukrainians are patient and can wait for years and even decades for a foreign country to help solve their life problems, in particular the problems of depopulation and depressed cities. It is indicative, but even the topic of the future restoration of Donbas is considered in no other way than in the context of calculating the "Marshall Plan" or contributions from the Russian Federation.
Kyiv, despite all its problems, has so far avoided depopulation and is already an incubator of urban ideas and strategies, including national ones. At some point, all that public activism happening at the tip of the iceberg will melt the ice, allowing us to look at the problems on a national scale and focus on their comprehensive solution. In short, having learned the forecast, relying on reality and striving for the horizon, we can use Kyiv as a tool to achieve our goals. So let's rock the boat, argue, discuss and act — I want to believe that we'll still make it!
