Recently, more and more up-to-date unique projects of urban improvement have been emerging in St. Petersburg, but there are even more to come in the nearest future. This was what experts talked about during the round table discussion CREATING COMFORTABLE URBAN ENVIRONMENT IN ST. PETERSBURG. CURRENT RESULTS, PROSPECTS BY 2030.
‘Comfortable urban environment is just like a frame for a painting. When there is none, everything doesn’t look too good,’ said Olga Cherdantseva, Head of Comfortable Urban Environment Provisions Competence Centre affiliated with the Improvement Committee of the St. Petersburg Government. This Centre was established 3 years ago, and since then they’ve arranged lots of seminars for students and municipal workers, plus several landscaping hackathons and conferences.
The expert specially emphasized that the Centre endeavored to establish some major sports fields and playgrounds, like the skating park at Betancourt Bridge, as well as to have green spaces arranged. St. Petersburg is getting increasingly more flower beds and gardens, and the plants within are mostly perennials and grain varieties. However, Olga Cherdantseva complained that the plant farms can’t cover the city’s needs. The state ones have long become a thing of the past, and the private ones aren’t enough.
To solve the problem, the urban authorities establish transformer gardens. One of them was arranged at the Blue Bridge nearby Isaakiyevskaya Square, and the other – in Yakornaya Square (Kronstadt). Both were really popular with tourists and locals. This year, the transformer garden will be arranged at Moskovskaya Square. According to Evgenia Tsyruleva, Deputy Head of Administration of the Moscow District of St. Petersburg, there will be artificial hills all covered with flowers and 70+ linden trees. Evgenia Tsyruleva also spoke about other projects they are getting ready to implement in their district. For example, modern improvement initiatives are under design for the City of Heroes Park, the boulevard at Yuri Gagarin Prospect, and other locations. Moreover, they are currently working on the beautification concept for the road to Pulkovo Airport.
Only this year, the urban authorities allocated 4.6 billion rubles for improvement and beautification of the city’s yards. According to Olga Cherdantseva, this is an unprecedented amount.
When passed word, Valentina Karpova, Managing Partner at Project 1 Company, shared their experience of effective development of urban improvement projects. According to her, common mistakes are trying to develop a project without any fundamental concept, without due regard to the regional specifics, or with reference to the outdated topographic survey. Valentina Karpova insisted that any of such mistakes can slow down and complicate the project. On the other hand, the best results can be achieved when the customer provides a viable and reasonable technical assignment and the contractor comprehends the customer’s wishes and takes effort to bring them to life, not to make some cool thing out of the existing context.