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