Guiding Lines: The Plan That Never Was

The capital had lived for six years without any effective general plan. In 1999 the document was drawn up and it was then that the Soviet-era program adopted in 1971 lost effect. The draft of the new plan was passed into law and all companies and individuals active on the real estate market had to comply with its provisions.

In practice, however, following its vague provisions proved to be quite difficult. The same was true regarding town-planning programs addressing particular city districts, drawn up later with a view to further explicate the provisions of the general plan. A so-called individual approach of city official towards developers and of developers towards the officials prevailed on the market.

Finally, in 2005 the government came up with what was presented as a ‘full-fledged document’ that hardly differed from the 1999 draft in terms of its concept, key ideas or style. Only several provisions had been amended and on the whole the plan remained unchanged. Thus, the Moscow City Development Plan still looks like a protocol of intent rather than a plan of action.

The newly adopted General Plan offers no clear or detailed answer to the question of what the Moscow City Hall plans to do in the capital within the next 20 years. The plan states that the city is pursuing the goal of “ensuring the sustainable development” of Moscow, “creating a favorable environment for human activities, preserving and enhancing the unique historic appearance of the city”.

It remains unclear what actions exactly the city government plans to undertake in order to create that favorable environment; the plan sets no deadlines and designates no government bodies to oversee its implementation and says nothing about the penalties to be faced if the targets are not met.

The smallest area addressed by the plan in detail is a territory the size of a micro-district. Every such territorial unit is included in the town-planning program for each specific okrug or district of the city. [An Okrug includes several districts].

The plan only restricts construction in each particular territory by setting approximate standards in terms of height, housing density, and the correlation between residential, non-residential properties and green areas. It falls short, however, of offering more detailed regulation, although the idea of zoning as such is good for the city as both government officials and realtors have emphasized many times.

But as experience has shown, Moscow developers have long been adept at adjusting their projects across the city to the meet the provisions set by the government.

The section of the plan authorizing district authorities to develop town-planning programs for their territories only strengthens the position of the developers further. All the details are added during the implementation of each particular project, be it an office building, a residential estate or a shopping center. As a result, many of those projects fail to comply with the zoning requirements. There are numerous examples.

The Moscow International Business Center Moscow-City is just one of them. For its development the city government had selected a site occupied by an industrial estate that could be easily moved to another location; however, the site was not the best option in terms of transport accessibility.

Then, there are the newly-built residential estates in Ostozhenka and Prechistenka where developers focused mainly on the size of the properties. Also, there are numerous large-scale office and retail projects in the area subject to tough housing density restrictions – on the Garden Ring.

The General Plan adopted by the government, just like its earlier draft, has not become the handbook for Moscow developers. Many of them thumbed through it just once and can barely remember a thing. One of the reasons is that developers have to address more specific and short-term tasks.

Businessmen without extensive connections at City Hall will find it hard to benefit from the General Plan. More often than not, developers are faced with obstacles thrown in their way by the administrations of certain districts.

When announcing their plans to erect new properties, developers in Moscow can never be sure that local bureaucrats will willingly share their knowledge of the district development plan with them, while in most European countries such data are published regularly on the Internet. It seems that the civil servant’s only objective is to derive profit for themselves as they play the role of a valuable source of information for developers.

The General Plan, it transpires, can also be used as a political instrument. The only reason the government refrained from adopting it in the course of six years is that Moscow and the federal authorities failed to agree on the scope of the capital city’s functions. The plan could have been disregarded altogether if European practice had not developed similar procedures.