Motherland

Moscow keeps expanding, and the region around it needs a different way of settling people. Motherland proposes a hybrid: somewhere that mixes town and country life, with proper infrastructure and nature close at hand. Its backbone is a "productive landscape", the basis for a network of settlements spread across the region rather than all centred on Moscow.

Context

For decades, growth in and around Moscow has been driven by the commercial property market, with little planning behind it. Given how the market and the building rules work, almost any piece of land, in the city or outside it, ends up as a housing estate and nothing else.

The result is the same housing everywhere. Countryside and old industrial sites are turning into uniform estates with almost nothing but homes. This model cannot protect the region's landscape, and as that landscape disappears and the city sprawls, quality of life goes down.

Approach

The project starts with an extensive study of how the Moscow region has grown, mapped graphically, alongside an analysis of the planning context, the history of the land, its geography and climate, and how the site and its neighbours are laid out and used. The work has two parts: analysis and proposal.

The masterplan has three themes — energy efficiency, bioremediation and biodiversity — tied together by a closed production loop.

Site

The best place to test the idea is the land to the south-west recently brought within Moscow's boundaries. The site is 58 km out along the Kaluga Highway (A101), between the Moscow Small Ring road and the outer railway ring.

It used to be a potato field. A small river runs past it into a large pond, and a paved road wraps around its west and south sides. Nearby are the village of Bezobrazovo and the Voronovo estate to the south, the village of Ryzhovo on the north shore of the pond, and dachas and new cottage developments strung haphazardly along the highway.

Proposal

Motherland is one piece of a larger set of interventions for the growing region, at three scales — small, medium and large — that together form a network of centres across the Moscow region.

What drives the change is a varied programme, with enough going on to draw both newcomers and people who already live nearby. The settlement is laid out in a line and built around society, the economy, governance, the environment, energy, conservation, production and farming.

This is a medium-sized archipelago: up to 100 hectares, at 90 people per hectare. Social infrastructure keeps everything within a 700-metre walk and caps the population at 5,100.

The layout has four active zones: the Courtyard, the Frame, the Context and the Surroundings.

The Production Loop

Production runs as a closed loop: self-sufficient and waste-free. The loop wraps around the central courtyard and stops the settlement from growing inwards, keeping that space free for social infrastructure. It produces intangible goods and recycles its own by-products along three lines:

• Energy: research labs and test stations working on renewable energy, from generation to use.
• Bioremediation: labs and stations for cleaning water and soil and processing waste.
• Biodiversity: experimental labs developing new farming technology and restoring biodiversity.

Conclusion

The productive landscape makes room for a more varied way of living for people beyond the city limits but still within Moscow's orbit. Set among small villages, dachas and existing infrastructure, it speeds up the development of the area around it and encourages a hybrid kind of community. Similar sites all over the Moscow region could host archipelagos of their own.