att ee ||| | By Morris Zeitlin T. art and science of city planning ori-: i Binated long before the Socialist Revolu- tion of 1917, but it has reached its highest Potential and effectiveness in the socialist -Gties. While the economic, land-use, hous- ‘ng, transportation, health, education, technical and building complexities of Modern Cities everywhere demand plan- {ng efforts to achieve some balance and Order in urban life and development, deca- €nt capitalist society frustrates such at- ‘empts. Its city planners see no way to | Tesolve the contradictions between social : needs and the private ownership of land, buildings and economic enterprises. They : ten express confusion, anxiety and help- €ssness at having to cope with the conse- _ Went irreconcilable conflicts and rivalries t beset capitalist cities. it In the course of trying to plan our cities, _ Ithas become apparent that no city govern- - Ment can adopt a firm city general plan of redevelopment, much less implement one. € most our city planners can do is gather Gata, indicate needs, show trends and sug- Best alternatives to a fragmented city . 1; and the best implementation they can achieve, once some compromise emerges from the city council chamber, is to devise some indirect controls to inhibit, to some degree, the willful behavior of contending groups of exploiters in a city divided against itself. : Socialist city planners have a happier fate. In-their socialist society, the harmony between’ public ownership of national wealth and the national economic planning stimulates great confidence, optimism and creativity. Their work is guided by the humanist socialist principle: ‘‘All for the Sake of man, all for the benefit of man.”’ Society’s publicly owned urban re- sources must, perforce, be planned for the general public welfare. In its socio-politi- cal structure, a city can, indeed must, plan what it needs, is able, and ready to do, and then proceed to do it. Ae socialist cities, Moscow holds the distinction of being the pioneer in so- cialist city planning and development. Early in its history, the young Soviet state allocated a generous part of its ten meager resources to plan and rebuild Moscow into a model socialist city, and to use its planning and reconstruction experience as a laboratory for evolving and testing social- ist city planning principles. Throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, a vigorous na- tional public debate took place in the Soviet Union to define the goals of socialist city planning and determine how future social- ist cities should be. The debate was not limited to archi- tects and city planners. At shops and union meetings, at special public lectures and forums, in the daily and periodical press and over the radio, many thousands of So- viet workers and intellectuals discussed, often heatedly, what they knew meant reaching unprecedented decisions about building new forms of human settlement that would profoundly affect not only their lives but the very future of mankind. The wide-ranging debate aired all pos- sible ideas. In 1931, the Party and govern- ment ordered drafting a master city plan for the city of Moscow. After much further public debate over the presented master- plan proposals, and after many revisions, the Soviet government adopted, in 1935, the first General Plan for the Redevelopment of Moscow. Since that year, the reconstruction of old and the building of new Soviet cities has continued. Each year, urban life gets better and richer, in contrast to the steady deter- ioration of urban life in capitalist cities. Each year this contrast proves more em- barrassing to capitalist ideologs peddling Soviet Lite Moscow: preserving the tradiional, building for the present-and the future, and maintaining protective green belts. capitalism as the best of all possible worlds: In acid tones, the bourgeois press — archi- tectural and planning journals included — prints hollow ‘‘aha’s’’ at Soviet self-criti- cism to “‘prove’’ the failure of socialist city planning. Cold warriors, who have turned their hostility and rhetoric into a credo, recall the popular debates on city planning in the early 1930s as a never-to-return period of “participatory democracy’’ in the Soviet Union. Today, they rant, ‘‘technocratic bureaucracy”’ makes all the planning deci- sions in the ‘‘monolithic’’ Soviet society, while in our “‘pluralistic’”’ society, freedom of debate assures ‘‘democratic participa- tion in the planning process.”’ W. asked Doctor of Architecture An- — drey V. Ikonnikov of Moscow, Director of the Institute for Scientific Research in Theory, History and Prospective Problems of Soviet Architecture, to comment on this allegation and to explain the city planning process in the City of Moscow. He replied: “The most important feature of city planning for Moscow is that it constitutes a complete system in which particular plan-" ning decisions flow out of more general ones. The general plan of the city forms the basis for the detailed planning of its dis- tricts, and the detailed planning for the districts serves as the basis for the design of individual building projects. And all this planning is conducted within the single system of the Moscow Architecture and Planning Administration. The Administra- tion’s activity, in turn, flows from, and is part of, the National Economic Plan. Our kind of city planning, furthermore, encom- passes all aspects of economic, social and cultural life of the city. The unity this or- ganizational system represents assures linkage between the national and local long- range, five-year, and annual plans. “The planning and project proposals worked out within the system of the Archi- tecture and Planning Administration are reviewed by the City Architectural Council in consultation with the city’s Chief Archi- tect, after which they are considered and approved for implementation by the Mos- cow City Soviet — the city’s elected legis- lative and executive body. Such approval is imperatively preceded by wide public hearings and review of each project. The forms of public review are quite varied and ~ depend in all instances on the nature of the proposed project. But, in all cases, public reviews are never limited to professional architectural circles alone. “In addition, there are many ‘feedback’ channels along which public opinion in- fluences the professional activity of archi- tects. Among them, added to the regularly functioning commissions of the City and Regional Soviets, is the Soviet Society for the Preservation of Cultural Monuments whose activity is important in a city having — as long a history as Moscow. The redevelop- ment of Moscow receives much attention — from newspapers and magazines whose circulation runs into millions. The public opinion they reflect and express is always _ carefully considered before final decisions are made. Public judgments of exhibited project proposals, as well as completed projects, by fellow architects and the in- tended or actual users of the projects con- stitutes an important activity of the USSR Union of Architects. . “One can cite many examples of chan- ges in architectural plans that resulted from public project reviews and expres- sions of public opinion. Many planning de- cisions were changed, for example, in or- der to preserve the environment of histori- cal buildings. “The wishes expressed by the people determine, to a great extent, the directions in the evolution of apartment types. The — latter are under constant study by research and planning offices.”’ The practice of city planning in Moscow holds true for every big Soviet city and is emulated by socialist cities everywhere. It has earned the admiration (and envy) of enlightened city planners the world over. ° WORLD MAGAZINE PACIFIC TRIBUNE—FRIDAY, APRIL 18, 1975—Page 7