Moscow’s Territorial Expansion: a Development Strategy or an Unjustified Necessity?

This article describes today’s planned projects and tangible issues concerning the prospective development of new territories, proposed by the Moscow city council. The local authorities estimate that, in the long term, the new territories will be populated by 1.5 to 2 million people, which makes it necessary to work on the development concepts, drawing upon the implementation of Moscow’s new development master plan. The local and federal government’s plans to expand Moscow’s territory have
received extensive mass media coverage. The past three years have seen a large number of events that became major newsmakers in informative and analytical publications. This article presents the results of content analysis, spanning as many as 3,500 publications, and shows the chronological development of the issue in the context of newsmaking events that are related to the expansion of Moscow’s territory. In addition, the article covers the key issues faced by the architectural and urban planning community, which have been registered in the preliminary conceptual studies for the Moscow metropolitan area development projects. Since today’s Russia lacks a national doctrine governing urban planning, and since it would be irrational to approach urban planning from the point of view of the city’s key industries, which do not have urban planning integrated into their production development strategies, architects and town planners are faced with a large number of challenges, which are connected with the conceptual base of drawing up urban planning documentation. And if not industrial production, what should the foundation of an urban development plan be? How do the concepts in question account for individuals’ needs, and are they geared to turn the city into a comfortable place to live? These are the questions that we bear in mind when turning to case studies: the summarized analysis of the needs expressed by people living in Moscow and the vicinity, presented by the project authors and their clients during the international contest of the Moscow metropolitan area development concepts. This articlepresents a unique point of view on the way new territories should be developed, offering a sociallyresponsible approach that is based on the social planning technologies and procedures introduced by the Center for Sociology of Management and Social Technology at the RAS Sociology Institute. This method has been successfully tested and incorporated during the development and implementation of urban planning initiatives and concepts that are vital for Moscow and other cities.

Keywords: diagnostics of a social situation, social and diagnostic research, ecoanthropocentric sociology, content–analysis, sociology of government.